STANDARDS 

W.C.  BROWNELL 


7.T2-. 


STANDARDS 


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STANDARDS 


BY 

W.   C.   BROWNELL 

It 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S   SONS 
1917 


COPYRIGHT,  1917,  »* 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

Published  April,  191? 


TO  ROBERT   BRIDGES 


35990 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


PAGE 


I.    MEASURES  OF  VALUE i 

II.    THE  PUBLIC 13 

III.  TASTE 39 

IV.  THE  INDIVIDUAL      64 

V.    THE  INNER  LIFE 89 

VI.    "  MODERN  ART  " in 

VII.  THE  CAUSE  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS  135 


STANDARDS 


MEASURES  OF  VALUE 

IT  is  perhaps  a  little  difficult  pre- 
cisely to  define  the  term  "stand- 
ards," but  it  is  happily  even  more 
superfluous  than  difficult  because  every 
one  knows  what  it  means.  Whereas 
criticism  deals  with  the  rational  appli- 
cation of  principles  applicable  to  the 
matter  in  hand,  and  has  therefore  a 
sufficiently  delimited  field  of  its  own, 
standards  are  in  different  case.  They 
belong  in  the  realm  of  sense  rather 
than  in  that  of  reason  and  are  felt  as 
ideal  exemplars  for  measurement  by 
comparison,  not  deduced  as  criteria 
of  absolute  authority.  As  such  they 


STANDARDS 

arise  insensibly  in  the  mind  which 
automatically  sifts  its  experiences,  and 
are  not  the  direct  result  of  reflection. 
In  a  word,  they  are  the  products  not 
of  philosophy  but  of  culture,  and  con- 
sequently pertinent  constituents  of 
every  one's  intellectual  baggage.  And 
in  the  field  of  art  and  letters  they  play 
an  especially  prominent  role  because 
art  and  letters  are  artificial  simplifica- 
tions of  material  much  less  synthetized 
and  therefore  less  susceptible  of  com- 
parative measurement,  namely  nature 
and  human  life.  The  possession  of 
them  is  equally  essential  to  artist  and 
public.  Without  standards  in  com- 
mon it  is  impossible  for  artist  and 
public  to  get  together,  for  without 
them  the  two  have  no  common  lan- 
guage. Even  low  standards  shared 
by  each  have  undoubtedly  a  strong 
cementing  force.  Any  kind  of  lan- 
guage uttered  and  savored  consti- 


MEASURES  OF  VALUE 

tutes  a  bond  of  solidarity  —  even  the 
variety  that  Walpole  said  he  used  on 
principle  because  everybody  under- 
stood it.  A  certain  standard  is  there- 
fore logically  to  be  induced  from  even 
such  practice  as  his --the  elementary 
standard  of  comprehensibility.  But 
as  the  instance  of  Walpole  shows  it 
may  easily  be  a  low  one  and,  in  con- 
sidering art  and  letters  at  all  events, 
I  shall  not  be  expected  to  apologize 
for  using  the  word  standard  to  denote 
a  quality  rather  than  a  defect,  and 
just  as  when  we  speak  of  "style"  we 
mean  good  style  and  not  bad,  to  mean 
by  standards  high  standards  not  low, 
or  what  is  the  same  thing,  exacting 
not  indulgent  ones.  Besides,  speak- 
ing practically,  nobody  not  negligible 
is  extravagant  enough  even  at  the 
present  time  to  profess  low  ones  as 
such;  and  those  that  may  be  con- 
sidered inevitable  —  since  the  act  of 


STANDARDS 

judging  in  itself  implies  standards  of 
some  kind  —  are  no  doubt  subcon- 
scious possessions.  So  that  we  may 
leave  both  these  out  of  the  account 
without  risk  of  misconception  in  not- 
ing as  one  of  the  really  significant 
signs  of  our  revolutionary  and  transi- 
tional time  the  wide  disappearance  of 
standards  altogether,  the  contempt  felt 
for  them  as  conventions,  the  indigna- 
tion aroused  by  them  as  fetters,  the 
\  hatred  inspired  by  them  as  tyranny. 

This  spirit  of  revolt  —  conceived  of 
course  as  renovation  by  its  votaries 
but  still  manifestly  in  the  destructive 
stage  witnessed  by  the  fierceness  of 
its  iconoclastic  zest,  so  much  greater 
than  its  constructive  concentration  - 
is  plainly  confined  to  no  one  people 
and  to  no  one  field  of  activity.  It  is 
indeed  so  marked  in  the  field  of  art 
and  letters  because  it  is  general  and 
because  the  field  of  art  and  letters 


MEASURES  OF   VALUE 

is  less  and  less  a  sheltered  enclosure 
and  more  and  more  open  to  the  winds 
of  the  world.  Everybody  is  agreed 
about  the  character  of  this  spirit, 
both  those  to  whom  it  signifies  the 
New  Day  of  a  diviner  order  and  those 
who  deem  it  a  return  to  chaos,  fatu- 
ously exultant  in  the  efficacy  of  a 
fresh  start.  Any  consideration  of  it 
accordingly  need  lose  no  time  in  grop- 
ing in  the  vague  as  to  its  nature.  Its 
friends  and  foes,  exponents  and  cen- 
sors, would  probably  agree  that  one 
of  its  main  constituent  traits  is  im-  ^ 
patience  with  established  standards  of 
all  sorts;  but  what  has  not  perhaps 
been  as  clearly  perceived  is  the  exten- 
sion of  this  impatience  to  an  inveter- 
ate hostility  to  standards  in  them- 
selves —  at  least,  as  I  have  just  noted, 
to  all  explicit  and  conscious  onesj 
Goethe's  idea  of  "culture  conquests" 
has  lost  its  value,  because  the  new 

5 


STANDARDS 

spirit  involves  a  break  with,  not  an 
evolution  of,  the  past.  In  the  new 
belles  lettres  a  historical  reference 
arouses  uneasiness  and  a  mythologi- 
cal allusion  irritation  because  they  are 
felt  to  be  not  obscure  but  outworn. 
The  heart  sinks  with  ennui  at  the  men- 
tion of  Amaryllis  in  the  shade  and 
thrills  with  pleasure  in  imaging  the 
imagist  in  the  bath.  The  plight  of 
the  pedant  in  the  face  of  such  prefer- 
ences as  prevail  arouses  pity.  His 
entire  mental  furniture  is  of  a  sudden 
outmoded.  The  coin  may  be  of  stand- 
ard weight  and  fineness,  it  loses  its 
currency  if  its  design  is  not  novel - 
making  it,  that  is  to  say,  fiat  and  irre- 
deemable in  the  mart  of  art,  sterling 
only  in  its  grosser  capacity.  The  ob- 
jection is  to  formulations  themselves 
as  restrictions  on  energy. 

The  age  feels  its  vitality  with  a  more 
exquisite  consciousness  than  any  that 
6 


MEASURES  OF  VALUE 

has  preceded  it.  It  does  little  else, 
one  may  say  in  a  large  view,  than 
in  one  form  or  another  express,  illus- 
trate, or  celebrate  this  consciousness. 
And  every  one  who  sympathetically 
"belongs"  to  it  feels  himself  stanchly 
supported  by  the  consensus  of  all  it 
esteems.  Nothing  fortifies  —  and  oc- 
cludes, it  may  be  added  —  like  such 
confirmation.  The  militancy  of  the 
age  therefore  finds  itself  not  only  in 
possession  of  a  perfectly  definite  —  if 
mainly  destructive  —  credo,  but  of  a 
practically  united  and  enthusiastic 
army.  Bunyan  would  certainly  have 
given  the  banner  inscribed  "Anarchy" 
to  one  of  his  Diabolonian  captains. 
But  who  now  reads  Bunyan  —  any 
more  than  Bolingbroke  —  or  has  ever 
read  him  ?  All  the  "modernist"  needs 
to  do  if  challenged  is  to  follow  the 
example  of  Max  Miiller,  who  replied 
to  an  opponent  seeking  to  confute 
7 


STANDARDS 

him  by  citing  St.  Paul:  "Oh!  Paulus; 
I  do  not  agree  with  Paulus." 

Why  is  it  that  the  present  age  differs 
so  radically  from  its  predecessors  in 
its  attitude  to  its  ancestry  ?  Why  its 
sudden  break  with,  its  drastic  depar- 
ture from,  its  own  traditions,  its  light- 
hearted  and  adventurous  abandonment 
of  its  heritage  ?  Why  does  it  so  cheer- 
ily contemplate  complete  substitution 
instead  of,  as  has  been  the  programme 
of  revolutionaries  hitherto,  ameliora- 
tion and  advance  ?  To  compare  great 
things  with  small,  Christianity  assim- 
ilated the  antique  world  in  trans- 
forming it.  The  Renaissance  was  man- 
ifestly not  a  nais sauce;  the  Reforma- 
tion as  plainly  not  a  fresh  formation. 
The  Revolution  was  retrospective  as 
well  as  inventive  and,  enriching  its 
imagination  with  culture,  justified  its 
most  energetic  phases  by  the  appeal 
to  reason  rather  than  to  pure  energy 
8 


MEASURES  OF  VALUE 

-which  indeed  it  regulated  radically 
enough.  The  present  ochlocratic  ex- 
pansion, modified  only  by  concentra- 
tion upon  securing  expansion  for  others 
and  contemptuous  of  results  achieved 
even  to  this  end  by  any  former  experi- 
ence, is  so  striking  because  it  is  in  no 
wise  a  phase  of  traceable  evolution 
but  is  so  marked  a  variation  from 

type. 

The  cause  is  to  be  found,  no  doubt, 
in  the  immense  extension  in  our  time 
of  what  may  be  called  the  intellectual 
and  aesthetic  electorate,  in  which,  ow- 
ing to  education  either  imperfect  or 
highly  specialized,  genuine  culture  has~ 
become  less  general;  with  the  result 
that  the  intellect,  which  has  standards, 
has  lost  co-operative  touch  with  the 
susceptibility  and  the  will,  which  have 
not,  but  whose  activities  are  vastly 
more  seductive  as  involving  not  only 
less  tension,  but  often  no  tension  at  all. 

9 


STANDARDS 

For  the  instinctive  hostility  to  stand- 
ards proceeds  from  the  tension  which 
conformity  imposes  both  on  the  artist 
who  produces  and  the  public  which 

/"appreciates.  Hence  the  objection  to 
standards  as  conventions,  and  to  con- 
ventions as  in  conflict  with  the  spon- 
taneity which  is  a  corollary  of  our 

[jenergetic  vitality.  Conventions  they 
certainly  are,  and  the  epithet  "con- 
ventional" has  doubtless  earned  the 
odium  it  has  realized.  But  it  is  a 
mark  of  naivete  to  object  to  conven- 
tions as  such.  Criticism  may  properly 
analyze  them  in  examining  their  title 
to  validity  in  the  disputed  cases  with 
which  it  is  a  considerable  part  of  the 
function  of  criticism  to  deal.  But 
no  one  has  heretofore  maintained  that 
there  are  not  useful  conventions. 
Those  of  the  stage  for  instance  are 
even  necessary.  Those  of  ornament, 
even  structural  ornament,  hardly  less 
10 


MEASURES  OF  VALUE 

so.  In  fact  the  foundations  of  the 
edifice  in  the  roomy  upper  stories  of 
which  the  artist  works  and  the  public 
enjoys  are  based  on  conventions  tested 
by  the  application  of  principles  by 
criticism  and  established  as  sound. 
Conventions  that  are  standards  are, 
in  a  word,  not  conventions  merely. 
And  the  more  securely  and  uncon- 
sciously both  artist  and  public  can 
rest  on  them  without  constant  verifica- 
tion of  their  ready-reckoner,  as  Carlyle 
puts  it,  the  less  strain  will  there  be  on 
spontaneity  of  an  elevated  instead  of 
an  elementary  order  and  on  the  appre- 
ciation of  its  exercise.  Any  one  whose 
spontaneity  is  unable  to  find  scope 
for  its  exercise  in  these  upper  stories, 
or  is  unprepared  by  the  requisite  pre- 
liminary discipline  to  cope  with  the 
competition  he  finds  there,  and  who  in 
consequence  undertakes  to  reconstruct 
the  established  foundations  of  the  splen- 
n 


STANDARDS 

did  structure  of  letters  and  art,  will  as- 
suredly need  all  the  vitality  that  even 
a  child  of  the  twentieth  century  is 
likely  to  possess. 


12 


II 

THE   PUBLIC 

THE  mutual  relation  existing  be- 
tween artist  and  public  has  al- 
ways been  obvious  to  any  analysis  of 
the  origin  and  development  of  art, 
whose  genesis  plainly  proceeds  from 
the  fusion  of  co-operation  and  whose 
growth  has  been  governed  by  demand 
not  less  than  by  supply,  since  however 
the  artist  may  have  stimulated  de- 
mand he  is  himself  a  product.  It  is 
plain,  accordingly,  that  in  the  main  a 
public  gets  not  only,  as  has  been  re- 
marked, the  newspapers  it  deserves, 
but  the  art  and  letters  it  appreciates. 
And  since  every  public  at  present  is 
far  more  sensitive  than  ever  before 
to  the  general  spirit  of  the  era  without 

13 


STANDARDS 

restrictions  of  time  and  place,  our  own 
is  as  open  as  any  other  to  the  prevail- 
ing cosmopolitan  spirit  of  revolt  against 
the  accepted  and  the  standard,  with 
corresponding  results  in  its  letters  and 
art.  In  this  field  we  have  always, 
perhaps,  been  less  marked  by  origina- 
tion than  by  impressionability,  and 
no  doubt  our  reflection  of  cosmopoli- 
tan influences  at  the  present  time  is  due 
to  the  same  disposition  —  observable 
indeed  now  elsewhere  than  in  this 
special  field;  in,  for  example,  the  adop- 
tion of  foreign  forms  of  social  violence 
without  foreign  justification,  the  ten- 
dency of  our  social  sentimentalists,  in 
fine,  as  has  been  observed,  "not  to  re- 
dress a  grievance  but  to  create  one." 
The  grievance  of  standards,  at  all 
events,  we  have  taken  very  hard,  and, 
owing  to  our  ingrained  individualism, 
have  accentuated  what  elsewhere  has 
been  a  more  unified  phase  of  a  general 

14 


THE  PUBLIC 

movement  by  the  incoherency  of  per- 
sonal obstreperousness.  This  solvent 
has  disintegrated  the  force  as  well  as 
the  decorum  of  our  public,  and  made 
it  clear  that  the  agency  of  which  art 
and  letters  now  stand  in  most  urgent 
need  is  a  public  with  standards  to 
which  they  may  appeal  and  by  which 
they  may  be  constrained. 

A  detached  observer  must  admit, 
however,  that  they  seem  less  likely  to 
get  it  than  they  have  been  heretofore, 
since  the  changes  that  have  taken 
place  in  our  own  generation  have  been 
in  the  direction  of  enfeebling  this 
public  by  extension  and  dissipating 
its  concentrated  influence  by  diversi- 
fication. Democracy-- to  which,  so 
far  as  art  and  letters  are  concerned, 
any  advocate  who  does  not  conceive 
it  as  largely  the  spread  in  widest  com- 
monalty of  aristocratic  virtues  is  a 
traitor — has  largely  become  a  self- 
15 


STANDARDS 

authenticating  cult,  as  antagonistic 
as  Kultur  to  culture,  and  many  of  its 
devotees  now  mainly  illustrate  aristo- 
cratic vices:  arrogance,  contemptu- 
ousness,  intolerance,  obscurantism. 
Terribly  little  learning  is  enough  to 
incur  the  damnatory  title  of  "  high- 
brow." The  connoisseur  is  deemed 
a  dilettante  and  the  dilettante  a  snob, 
fastidiousness  being  conceived  as  neces- 
sarily affectation  and  not  merely  evinc- 
ing defective  sympathies  but  actively 
mean.  "People  desire  to  popularize 
art,"  said  Manet,  "without  perceiving 
that  art  always  loses  in  height  what  it 
gains  in  breadth."  If  Moliere,  who 
spoke  of  his  metier  as  the  business  of 
making  les  honnetes  ^gens  laugh,  had 
only  practised  on  his  cook,  which  he 
is  said  to  have  also  done,  "we  should 
perhaps  have  had,"  observes  M.  Andre 
Gide,  "more  'Fourberies  de  Scapin' 
and  other  'Monsieur  de  Pourceaug- 
16 


THE   PUBLIC 

nacs/  but  I  doubt  if  he  would  have 
given  us  'Le  Misanthrope."  And 
M.  Gide  continues:  "These  honnetes 
gens,  as  Moliere  called  them,  equally 
removed  from  a  court  that  was  too 
rigid  and  a  pit  that  was  too  free,  were 
precisely  what  Moliere  regarded  as 
his  particular  public,  and  it  was  to 
this  public  that  he  addressed  himself. 
The  Court  of  Louis  XIV  represented 
formalism;  the  parterre  represented 
naturalism;  they  represented  good  taste. 
Without  the  Court  this  society  would 
not,  I  think,  have  been  possible.  And 
it  was  through  this  society  that  the 
admirable  French  tradition  was  so 
long  maintained." 

A  genuine  public  not  unlike  this  we 
once  had  and  we  have  it  no  longer, 
however  large  our  present  increment 
of  discriminating  individuals.  Its  lim- 
itations were  marked  but  they  empha- 
sized its  existence.  Its  standards  were 
17 


STANDARDS 

narrow,  but  it  had  standards.  We  had 
a  class  not  numerous  but  fairly  de- 
fined, corresponding  to  the  class  Charles 
Sumner  found  in  England,  distinct 
from  the  nobility  but  possessed  in 
abundance  of  serious  knowledge,  high 
accomplishment,  and  refined  taste,  the 
class,  precisely,  called  by  Moliere  les 
honnetes  gens.  We  have  now  a  far 
larger  public  but  a  promiscuous  one, 
in  which  the  elements  least  sensi- 
tive to  letters  and  art  are  dispropor- 
tionately large,  owing  among  other 

^  things  to  the  specialization  of  the  elec- 
tive system  with  its  consequent  de- 
struction of  common  intellectual  inter- 
ests and  therefore  of  common  standards 
in  our  higher  education;  and  in  which, 
owing  to  the  spread  of  popular  educa- 
tion, all  standards  are  often  swamped 
by  the  caprices  of  pure  appetite  and 

1  the  demands  of  undisciplined  desires. 
Rapacity  is  not  fastidious  and  the  kind 
18 


THE   PUBLIC 

of  art  and  literature  that  satisfies  its 
pangs  shares  its  quality  as  well  as  re- 
sponding quantitatively  to  its  exorbi- 
tant needs. 

The  colleges  no  longer  provide  the 
community  with  an  educated  class  in 
the  sense  in  which  they  used  to.  They 
are  greatly  increased  in  number  and 
prodigiously  in  size,  but  their  gradu- 
ates taken  in  the  mass  are  furnished 
with  a  different  equipment.  There  has 
been  a  marked  advance  in  the  various 
branches  of  learning  conveniently  to 
be  grouped  under  the  head  of  science, 
and  there  is  undoubtedly  much  more 
scholarship  of  any  and  all  kinds  in  the 
country  than  ever  before.  Its  con- 
tributions to  the  literature  of  all  sub- 
jects of  study  have  an  undoubted  and 
new  importance,  increasingly  recog- 
nized abroad,  for  example.  The  tech- 
nical side  of  the  art  of  writing  has  been 
effectively  studied  and  popularized  so 
19 


STANDARDS 

•that  all  manner  of  public  questions 
social  and  political  are  discussed  not 
only  competently  but  effectively  by 
writers  who  as  writers  have  no  estab- 
lished position.  The  text-book  liter- 
ature is  enormous  and  the  volume  of 
collateral  reading  allied  with  it  corre- 
spondingly large.  The  vast  popula- 
tion teaching  and  being  taught  is  por- 
tentous. Summer  as  well  as  winter 
the  round  proceeds  without  intermis- 
sion for  both  sexes  and  all  ages.  Art 
and  letters  never  before  received  a 
tithe  of  the  general  attention  now  be- 
stowed on  them.  Every  other  painter 
has  classes,  every  college  its  art  courses, 
every  English  Department  its  semi- 
naries in  short-story  or  play  writing. 
Add  the  output  of  the  common  schools 
and  the  American  educational  conspec- 
tus becomes  almost  grotesquely  impres- 
sive. The  proportion  it  bears  to  the 
increase  of  population,  however,  is 
20 


THE  PUBLIC 

a  qualifying  consideration,  the  obvi- 
ously superficial  character  of  much 
of  it  is  another,  the  encroachment  of 
business  on  the  professions  in  a  rising 
ratio  with  every  college  class  grad- 
uated, a  third.  Vocational  training 
has  ravaged  the  cloisters  of  the  cul- 
tural disciplines.  The  classics  have 
disappeared  before  the  universal  pas- 
sion for  preparing,  as  Arnold  observed, 
"to  fight  the  battle  of  life  with  the 
waiters  in  foreign  hotels/'  And  cer- 
tainly not  the  least  hostile  influence 
to  the  cultural  unification  of  a  public 
thus  miscellaneously  educated  is  the 
absorption  of  its  most  serious  elements 
in  the  various  special  studies  whose 
only  common  bond  is  an  indifference 
to  general  culture.  If  Darwin  could 
lose  his  interest  in  poetry  through  de- 
votion to  natural  science,  it  can  hardly 
be  expected  that  the  courses  which 
now  dominate  our  curriculums  will 


21 


STANDARDS 

fail  to  have  a  similar  effect,  except  in  so 
far  as  they  are  less  seriously  pursued. 

To  expect  literary  and  art  standards 
of  such  a  public  as  this  —  incontest- 
ably  superior  as  it  is  I  think,  in  other 
ways,  and  especially  as  it  appears  to 
the  eye  of  hope  !  —  is  visionary.  What 
does  such  a  public  ask  of  arts  and  let- 
ters ?  It  asks  sensation.  Hence  its 
exorbitant  demand  for  novelty,  which 
more  surely  than  anything  else  satis- 
fies the  craving  for  sensation,  and  which 
accordingly  is  so  generally  accepted 
at  its  face  value.  The  demand  is 
impolitic  because  the  supply  is  dispro- 
portionately small.  An  ounce  of  al- 
cohol will  give  the  world  a  new  aspect, 
but  one  is  supposed  to  be  better  with- 
out it  if  for  no  other  reason  because 
a  little  later  two  ounces  are  needed, 
and  when  the  limits  of  capacity  are 
reached  the  original  staleness  of  things 
appears  intensified.  Undoubtedly  let- 
ters and  art  suffer  at  the  present  time 


THE   PUBLIC 

from  the  effort  to  satisfy  an  over- 
stimulated  appetite  which  only  extrav- 
agance can  appease.  The  demand 
is  also  unphilosophic  because  novelty 
is  of  necessity  transitory  'and  the 
moment  it  ceases  to  be  so  it  is  no 
longer  novel.  The  epithet  ''differ- 
ent," for  example,  now  so  generally 
employed  as  the  last  word  of  lauda- 
tion, we  should  hasten  to  make  the 
most  of  while  it  lasts;  some  little 
child,  like  the  one  in  Andersen's  story 
of  "The  Two  Cheats,"  is  sure  ere- 
long to  ask  how  it  is  synonymous  with 
"preferable."  And  in  losing  its  char- 
acter novelty  inevitably  of  course  loses 
its  charm.  Nothing  is  more  grotesque 
than  last  year's  fashions.  Fashions 
having  no  standards  they  appear  in 
reminiscence  in  sharp  stereotype,  and 
following  them  seems  stark  slavery. 
Ceasing  to  be  novel  they  disclose  their 
lack  of  quality.  In  fine  the  passion 
for  novelty  blinds  its  victim  to  the 

23 


STANDARDS 

distinction  between  intrinsic  and  ex- 
trinsic, which  is  all  the  more  impor- 
tant for  being  elementary.  It  would 
be  idle  to  deny  the  sanctions  of  the  ex- 
trinsic, but  it  is  obvious  that  in  this 
case  they  are  altogether  subjective. 
If  our  public  would  once  admit  that 

Othe  element  of  novelty  in  anything 
has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the 
value  of  the  object,  it  might  reflect 
usefully  on  the  value  of  the  mind  that 
considers  the  object,  with  the  result 
of  coming  to  perceive  on  the  one  hand 
that  all  that  can  be  asked  of  the  object 
is  to  possess  intrinsic  value,  and  on 
the  other  that  it  is  very  much  its  own 
business  to  justify  the  value  of  its 
novel  sensations.  This  may  easily  be 
below  standard,  like  the  pugnacity  of 
the  chivalrous  soul  who  had  only  heard 
of  the  Crucifixion  the  day  before. 

Carlyle,  reading  the  Scriptures  while 
presiding  at  family  prayers  in  the  home 
24 


THE   PUBLIC 

of  an  absent  friend  and,  encountering 
the  line,  "Is  there  any  taste  in  the 
white  of  an  egg?"  exclaiming,  to  the 
consternation  of  the  household,  "Bless 
my  soul,  I  didn't  know  that  was  in 
Job!"  exhibits  a  surprise  of  different 
quality  from  that  of  Emerson's  small 
boy  who,  laboriously  learning  the  al- 
phabet and  having  the  letter  pointed 
out  to  him,  exclaimed,  "The  devil,  is 
that  'Z'!"  It  has  a  richer  back- 
ground —  a  background  Carlyle  him- 
self needed  when,  announcing  that  he 
didn't  consider  Titian  of  great  impor- 
tance, he  earned  Thackeray's  retort 
that  the  fact  was  of  small  importance 
with  regard  to  Titian  but  of  much  with 
regard  to  Thomas  Carlyle.  So  on 
those  occasions,  admittedly  rare,  when  ^/ 
candor  compels  crudity  to  confess  to 
culture,  "I  never  thought  of  that," 
or  "What  surprises  me  about  Shake- 
speare is  his  modernness,"  what  cul- 

25 


STANDARDS 

ture  feels  is  the  lack  of  standards  im- 
plied in  the  lack  of  background  dis- 
closed. "How  do  you  manage  to 
invent  those  hats?"  inquired  a  friend 
of  the  comedian  Hyacinthe.  "I  don't 
invent  them,"  replied  the  actor,  "I 
keep  them." 

One  need  not  be  learned  in  its  hats 
to  value  the  light  a  knowledge  of  the 
past  throws  on  the  present.  Even  to 
despise  the  conventional  intelligently, 
one  should  know  its  raison  d'etre. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  the  current  dis- 
like of  it  is  largely  based  on  igno- 
rance. How  violate  precedent  with 
complete  satisfaction  without  a  real 
acquaintance  with  it  ?  What  wasted 
opportunities  for  iconoclastic  delight, 
what  neglected  possibilities  of  destruc- 
tive activity  lie  behind  the  veil  which 
for  the  uneducated  conceals  the  stand- 
ardized tradition.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  any  feebler  apostle  of  the  new 
26 


THE   PUBLIC 

spirit  should  balk  at  the  general  dis- 
position to  revolt  for  its  own  sake  and 
maintain  that  mere  neglect  of  prece- 
dent and  confining  oneself  to  the  posi- 
tive business  of  personal  expression 
without  regard  to  either  following  or 
defying  precedent  is  the  path  to  true 
originality,  how  is  one  to  know  that  he 
is  not  essentially  respecting,  or  in  the 
case  of  our  geniuses  repeating,  some 
masterpiece  of  the  unvalued  past  ?  In 
such  a  case  those  who  do  know  can 
hardly  be  blamed  for  taking  a  different 
kind  of  interest  from  his  own  in  his 
self-expression.  They  may  rank  his 
performance  intelligently,  but  how  can 
he  ?  His  work  may  be  good  but  his 
philosophy  must  be  false.  In  strict 
logic  therefore  only  familiarity  with 
the  standards  of  achievement  can  jus- 
tify the  radical  iconoclast  to  himself, 
little  general  learning  has  come  to 
be  a  useful  thing  in  a  world  where 
27 


STANDARDS 

from  its  infrequency  it  has  ceased  to 
be  dangerous  and  where  the  thirsty 
drink  deep  but  taste  not  the  Pierian 
spring. 

Even  subjectively  considered  the 
charm  of  novelty  has  no  greater  claim 
than  that  of  familiarity.  Real  value 
in  the  cause  once  given  —  without 
which  appreciation  of  its  novelty  is 
valueless,  since  every  one  must  ac- 
knowledge that  to  admire  what  is  in- 
ferior merely  because  it  is  novel  would 
lower  the  most  elementary  of  standards 
-  familiarity  is  as  admirable  a  sen- 
sation as  novelty.  I  think  myself  it 
is  in  better  taste,  but  an  inclination 
to  one  or  the  other  is  no  doubt  a  mat- 
ter of  temperament.  Old  things  of 
value  newly  felt  and  newly  presented, 
new  things  of  value  aptly  introduced, 
have  their  own  abundant  warrant, 
which  it  would  be  stupid  to  contest. 
St.  Paul  relied  on  the  Athenians' 
28 


THE   PUBLIC 

open-mindedness  in  this  respect  to  sec- 
ond his  zeal  for  their  spiritual  welfare, 
and  St.  Augustine  confesses  charming- 
ly the  charm  he  felt  in  the  fugitive 
beauties  of  new  aspects  of  nature. 
Scherer  has  an  admirable  passage  in 
eulogy  of  freshness  of  view  and  ex- 
pression —  in  high  differentiation,  of 
course,  which  is  the  whole  point.  No 
one  would  deny  the  repulsiveness  of 
the  commonplace,  the  trite,  the  fusty, 
or  the  unprofitableness  of  the  stale  and 
flat.  In  fact  the  clamor  for  novelty 
has  itself  already  reached  the  stage  at 
which  it  enters  this  category.  '  But 
familiarity  in  what  is  admirable  has 
an  equal  authentication.  The  richer 
the  mind,  the  more  it  delights  in  asso-  S 
ciations;  the  more  undisciplined  the  ^ 
temper,  the  more  it  chafes  at  them  as 
at  best  immaterial.  Toujours  perdrix 
contains  a  warning  for  the  intellectual 
palate,  but  this  organ  has  other  sources 
29 


STANDARDS 

of  satisfaction  than  variety;  for  ex- 
ample, Alonso  of  Aragon's  "Old  wood 
to  burn,  old  wine  to  drink,  old  friends 
to  trust,  old  authors  to  read."  "What 
novelty,"  says  George  Eliot,  "is  worth 
that  sweet  monotony  where  everything 
is  known,  and  loved  because  it  is 
known?"  Deprivation  of  it  often 
brings  out  its  real  quality  with  unex- 
pected sharpness.  The  prodigal  son 
no  doubt  found  a  solace  in  the  old  en- 
vironment which  had  escaped  the  notice 
of  his  elder  brother,  and  perhaps  it 
is  still  greater  experience  with  husks 
that  our  public  chiefly  needs  to  teach 
it  the  attractiveness  of  the  familiar 
that  is  established  —  not  causelessly  - 
and  wean  it  from  the  pursuit  of  the 
untried,  the  untested,  and  accordingly 
the  problematical.  At  all  events,  by 
definition  novelty  can  have  no  stand- 
ards and  consequently  the  love  of  it 
though  it  may  characterize  cannot 

30 


THE   PUBLIC 

constitute  a  public  as  distinct  from 
the  individuals  that  materially  com- 
pose it.  And  it  is  so  much  the  most 
prominent  as  fairly  to  seem  the  only 
common  characteristic  that  with  re- 
gard to  art  and  letters  our  public  pos- 
sesses. 

A  sound  philosophy,  however,  is  no 
more  than  general  culture,  the  de- 
sideratum of  an  emotional  age,  and 
it  is  not  difficult  to  trace  our  deprecia- 
tion of  the  former  to  a  popular  recoil 
from  disciplined  thought,  in  itself  emo- 
tional, and  of  the  latter  to  the  purely 
emotional  extension  which  our  demo- 
cratic tradition  has  of  late  so  remark- 
ably acquired.  One  of  the  results 
has  been  the  wide-spread  feeling  that 
intellectual  standards  are  undemo- 
cratic, as  excluding  the  greenhorn  and 
the  ignoramus  from  sympathies  now 
extended  to  the  sinner  and  the  criminal 
-who  have  assuredly  a  different  title 


STANDARDS 

to  them,  belonging  at  least  to  a  differ- 
ent order  of  unfortunates.  How  other- 
wise account  for  the  diffusion  of  pop- 
ular discussion  of  literary  and  art,  as 
well  as  social  and  political,  themes 
among  the  inexpert,  whose  interest 
in  them  is  taken  as  evidence  of  the 
spread  of  intelligence,  though  it  is  an 
interest  which  would  cease  if  confronted 
by  subjection  to  intelligent  standards? 
The  less  the  science  of  these  themes 
is  understood,  the  more  opportunity 
for  the  voces  et  prceterea  nihil,  now  so 
audible  and  often  so  eloquent  in  their 
exposition.  One  of  the  commonest  of 
current  phenomena  is  the  emotional 
preoccupation  of  intelligent  but  unen- 
riched  minds,  in  instinctive  revolt 
against  traditional  standards,  with  res 
non  judicatce,  things  yet  to  be  ad- 
judged, reading  nothing  else,  for  exam- 
ple —  save  fiction,  of  course  —  and 
showing  in  consequence  less  augmen- 

32 


THE   PUBLIC 

tation  of  mental  furniture  than  the 
results  of  prolonged  emotional  stimu- 
lation. 

A  public  of  which  a  large  element 
feels  in  this  way  is  bound  to  make  few 
demands  of  knowledge  in  its  artists 
and  authors  —  even  in  its  writers  of 
fiction !  Accordingly  one  must  admit 
that  in  the  field  of  fiction  —  bewilder- 
ingly  populous  at  the  present  time  - 
our  later  writers,  excelling  in  what- 
ever way  they  may,  nevertheless  differ 
most  noticeably  from  their  European 
contemporaries  in  possessing  less  of 
the  knowledge  which  is  power  here  as 
elsewhere.  They  are  certainly  not  less 
clever  any  more  than  their  public  is 
less  clever  than  the  European  public. 
But  every  one  is  clever  nowadays. 
We  are  perhaps  suffering  from  a  sur- 
feit of  cleverness,  since  being  merely 
clever  it  is  impossible  to  be  clever 
enough.  Our  cleverness  is  apt  to  stop 
33 


STANDARDS 

short  of  imagination  and  rest  content- 
edly in  invention,  forgetful  of  Shelley's 
reminder  that  the  Muses  were  the 
daughters  of  Memory.  Columbus  him- 
self invented  nothing,  but  the  chil- 
dren of  his  discovery  have  imper- 
fectly shared  the  ruling  passion  to 
which  they  owe  their  existence.  New 
discoveries  in  life  are  hardly  to  be 
expected  of  those  who  take  its  por- 
trayal so  lightly  as  to  neglect  its  exist- 
ing maps  and  charts.  And  this  is  why 
our  current  fiction  seems  so  experi- 
mental, so  speculative,  so  amateur  in 
its  portrayal  of  life,  why  it  seems  so 
immature  in  one  word,  compared  grade 
for  grade  with  that  of  Europe.  The 
contrast  is  as  sensible  in  a  page  as  in 
a  volume  in  any  confrontation  of  the 
two. 

I    know   of  no   English   short-story 
writer  of  her  rank  who  gives  me  the 
positive  delight  that  Miss  Edna  Fer- 
34 


THE   PUBLIC 

her  does  —  or  did.  But  why  should 
we  play  all  the  time  ?  Why  should  we 
bracket  O.  Henry's  immensely  clever 
"expanded  anecdotes,"  as  Mrs.  Ger- 
ould  calls  them,  with  the  incisive 
cameos  carved  out  of  the  very  sub- 
stance of  life  taken  seriously,  however 
limitedly,  of  a  consummate  artist  like 
Maupassant?  Such  fixed  stars  of  our 
fiction  as  Henry  James  and  Mr.  How- 
ells  are  perfectly  comparable  with  their 
European  coevals,  but  I  am  speak- 
ing of  the  present  day  —  not  of  the 
day  before  yesterday  whose  horoscope, 
so  rapid  are  our  changes,  is  already 
superseded.  And  how  are  we  to  have 
a  standard  of  culture,  of  solidity,  of 
intellectual  seriousness,  in  fine,  as  ex- 
acting as  that  to  which  a  Swiss  or  a 
Scandinavian  novelist  is  held,  a  stand- 
ard to  which  such  rather  solitary 
writers  as  Mrs.  Wharton  in  prose  and 
Mrs.  Dargan  in  poetry,  having  the 

35 


STANDARDS 

requisite  talent  and  equipment,  in- 
stinctively conform,  if  our  public  is 
so  given  over  to  the  elation  of  emotion 
as  to  frown  impatiently  on  any  intellec- 
tual standard  of  severity,  or,  owing 
to  its  dread  of  conventionality,  on  any 
common  standard  whatever  ?  An  en- 
thusiastic writer,  herself  a  poet,  speaks 
ecstatically  of  "the  unprecedented  mag- 
nificence of  this  modern  era,  the  un- 
precedented emotion  of  this  changing 
world,"  as  if  the  two  were  interde- 
pendent, which  I  dare  say  they  are, 
but  also  as  if  mercurial  emotion  were 
a  better  thing  than  constancy,  which 
is  more  doubtful,  or  as  if  unprece- 
dented emotion  were  a  good  thing  in 
itself,  whereas  it  is  probably  bad  for 
the  health.  Orderly  evolution  - 
which  is  at  least  spared  the  retesting 
of  its  exclusions  —  is  unsatisfactory 
to  the  impatient,  desirous  of  changing 
magnificence.  It  involves  such  long 
periods  that  we  can  hardly  speak  of 
36 


THE   PUBLIC 

its  abruptest  phases  as  unprecedented 
unless  they  occur  as  "sports,"  which 
are  indeed  immune  from  the  virus  of 
precedent.  However,  it  is  quite  right 
to  talk  of  this  changing  world,  and, 
since  it  is  so  changing,  difficult  to  talk 
of  it  long  —  except  in  the  language  of 
emotion.  Otherwise  than  emotionally 
one  is  impelled  to  consider  its  shiftings 
as  related  to  the  standards  of  what  is 
stable,  which  is  just  what  it  objects  to. 
Hence  the  difficulty  its  apostles  and 
its  critics  have  in  getting  together 
about  it. 

To  assign  to  art  and  letters  the 
work  of  transforming  aesthetically  the 
representative  public  of  an  era  like 
this  is  to  set  them  a  task  of  a  diffi- 
culty that  would  deject  Don  Quixote 
and  dismay  Mrs.  Partington.  There 
remains  the  alternative  of  increasing 
the  "remnant/'  Of  the  undemocratic 
doctrine  of  the  "remnant"  in  the  social 
and  political  field  I  have  never,  myself, 
37 


STANDARDS 

felt  either  the  aptness  or  the  attraction. 
The  interests  of  people  in  general  are 
not  those  of  the  remnant,  and  his- 
tory shows  how,  unchecked,  the  rem- 
nant administers  them.  Except  in  a 
few  fundamentals  they  are  less  mat- 
ters of  principle  than  matters  of  ad- 
justment. And  the  attractiveness  of 
the  doctrine  must  be  measured  by 
the  character  of  the  remnant  itself 
-  in  our  case  certainly  hardly  worth 
the  sacrifice  of  the  rest  of  the  nation 
to  achieve.  But  the  remnant  in  art 
and  letters  is  another  affair  altogether. 
It  cannot  be  too  largely  increased  at 
whatever  sacrifices;  and  the  only  way 
in  which  it  can  be  increased  is  by  the 
spread  of  its  standards.  Otherwise 
art  and  letters  will  be  deprived  of  the 
public  which  is  their  stimulus  and 
their  support  and  be  reduced  to  that 
which  subjects  them  to  the  satisfac- 
tion of  standardless  caprice. 
38 


Ill 

TASTE 

A  HETEROGENEOUS  public  at 
*  ^  one  chiefly  in  its  passion  for  nov- 
elty may  easily  have  the  vitality  it 
vaunts,  but  there  is  one  quality  which 
ineluctably  it  must  forego:  name- 
ly, taste.  I  hasten  to  acknowledge 
that  it  reconciles  itself  with  readiness 
to  this  deprivation  and  depreciates 
taste  with  the  sincerity  inseparable 
from  the  instinct  for  self-preservation. 
Certainly  there  are  ideals  of  more 
importance,  and  if  the  sacrifice  of 
taste  were  needed  for  their  success 
it  would  be  possible  to  deplore  its 
loss  too  deeply.  We  may  be  sure, 
however,  that  the  alternative  is  fun- 
damentally fanciful.  The  remark  once 

39 


STANDARDS 

made  of  an  American  dilettante  of 
distinction  that  he  had  convictions  in 
matters  of  taste,  and  tastes  in  matters 
of  conviction,  implies,  it  is  true,  an 
exceptional  rather  than  a  normal  atti- 
tude. But  though  it  is  quite  needless 
to  confound  the  two  categories,  it  is 
still  quite  possible  to  extend  consider- 
ably the  conventional  confines  of  taste 
without  serious  encroachment  on  the 
domain  of  convictions.  Nothing  is  in 
better  taste  than  piety,  for  example. 
And  since  also  nothing  is  more  funda- 
mental, any  one  in  search  of  an  explana- 
tion of  our  present  wide-spread  antip- 
athy to  taste  as  outworn  and  unvital 
might  do  worse  than  scrutinize  the 
various  psychological  changes  that  have 
accompanied  the  much-talked-of  de- 
cline of,  at  least  formal,  religion  and 
the  transformation,  at  any  rate,  of  the 
spirit  of  conformity  to  carefully  and 
not  capriciously  constructed  credos. 
40 


TASTE 

Taste  indeed  is  essentially  a  matter 
of  tradition.  No  one  originates  his 
own.  Of  the  many  instances  in  which 
mankind  is  wiser  than  any  man  it  is 
one  of  the  chief.  It  implies  conform- 
ity to  standards  already  crystallized 
from  formulae  already  worked  out. 
In  the  famous  preface  of  his  "Crom- 
well" Victor  Hugo  asserted,  to  be  sure, 
that  an  admirable  work  might  be  com- 
posed of  all  that  the  arid  breath  of 
gens  de  gout  from  Scudery  to  La  Harpe 
had  dried  up  in  its  germ.  But  he  re- 
ferred to  the  pedantries  of  professional 
classic  criticism  rather  than  to  the 
fastidiousness  of  a  sensitive  public. 
The  preface  long  ago  became  itself 
the  classic  statement  of  the  case  for 
romanticism  and  established  stand- 
ards of  its  own.  All  that  it  contains  is 
no  doubt  useful  to  remember,  though 
it  is  rather  sentimental  than  profitable 
speculation  to  dwell  on  the  mute  and 

41 


i 


STANDARDS 

inglorious  of  country  churchyards,  and 
one  may  excusably  take  a  more  cheer- 
ful view  of  the  consequences  resulting 
from  the  interposition  of  the  chevaux 
de  frise  of  pure  conventions,  even, 
between  the  otherwise  unprotected 
public  and  the  crowd  of  candidates  for 
its  favor. 

Of  Hugo  himself  Renan,  a  better 
judge  in  this  particular,  observed  that 
"he  had  not  time  to  possess  taste." 
He  offered  compensations  for  the  de- 
ficiency, it  must  be  acknowledged,  but 
to  the  very  considerable  number  of 
writers  who  can  hardly  hope  to  equal 
him  in  this  respect  the  cultivation  of 
taste  may  none  the  less  be  commended. 
They  can  more  easily  afford  the  re- 
quired time.  Renan  even,  compact 
of  taste  as  he  was,  lost  touch  with  it 
occasionally  —  in  the  "Abbesse  de 
Jouarre,"  for  instance,  and  perhaps 
also  in  meriting  Doudan's  remark: 
42 


TASTE 

"I  know  of  no  theologian  with  a  more 
intimate  knowledge  of  Oriental  flora." 
And  taste  has  the  great  advantage  of 
being  cultivable.  There  is  nothing 
recondite  about  it.  It  is  a  quality 
particularly  proper  to  the  public  as 
distinct  from  the  artist.  Indeed  its 
possession  by  the  public  provides  the 
artist  with  precisely  the  constraint  he 
most  needs  and  is  most  apt  to  forget 
-  especially  in  the  day  of  so-called 
"free  art."  It  cannot  be  acquired  of 
course  without  co-operation;  and  it 
involves  the  effort  needed  to  acquire 
and  is  not  fostered  by  the  emotion  that 
is  an  end  in  itself.  At  the  present 
time,  accordingly,  its  pursuit  is  at- 
tended with  the  discomfort  inherent 
in  the  invidious.  It  is  particularly 
ironical  to  pass  one's  life,  as  doubt- 
less is  still  done  now  and  then,  in 
regretting  that  one  knows  so  little 
and  at  the  same  time  arouse  disgust 
43 


STANDARDS 

for  knowing  so  much.  The  remnant, 
if  extended,  will  have  to  be  of  martyr 
stuff  but  it  need  fear  no  compunctions 
if  it  is  tempted  into  occasional  reprisal, 
consoled  by  RivaroPs  reflection:  "No 
one  thinks  of  how  much  pain  any 
man  of  taste  has  had  to  suffer  before 
he  gives  any." 

Our  own  public  has  always  been  a 
little  exceptionally  sensitive  about  the 
limitations  of  taste,  even  in  days  when 
it  more  generally  possessed  it.  But 
currently  we  merely  exaggerate  a  neg- 
lect of  it  that  is  wide-spread.  One 
thinks,  of  course,  of  France.  It  is 
not  to  be  denied  that  in  France  the 
democratic  spirit  with  its  associated 
anarchy  has  invaded  the  composure 
of  the  taste  which,  in  the  aesthetic 
field,  more  than  any  other  element 
constitutes  French  superiority.  Our 
own  extravagances  and  incoherences 
in  this  definite  field  are  apt  to  be  re- 
44 


TASTE 

flections  of  similar  French  phenomena. 
Paris  itself,  still  the  finest  civic  spec- 
tacle ever  secured  by  the  co-operation 
of  natural  growth  and  express  design, 
shows  in  spots  and  details  an  atten- 
uation of  decorum  and  conformity  - 
shows  the  corrosion  of  the  spirit  of 
"free  art."  In  France,  however,  aes- 
thetic standards  are  unlikely  to  be 
permanently  deposed  by  fanaticism 
or  forgotten  by  obtuseness.  They  are 
constantly  recalled  to  the  sense  by  the 
models  that  embody  them,  and  con- 
stantly recur  to  the  reflection  of  minds 
insensibly  more  or  less  moulded  by  the 
tradition  they  define.  Moreover  the 
principles  that  underlie  them  are  con- 
stantly reuttered  by  voices  less  noisy 
than  penetrating  but  thoroughly  na- 
tional in  sounding  the  overtones  of 
culture  however  "advanced"  the  air, 
and  in  exhibiting  an  aristocratic  qual- 
ity even  in  chanting  the  most  popu- 

45 


STANDARDS 

lar  paean.  There  is,  besides,  running 
through  the  currents  and  eddies  of  the 
moment,  which  boil  rather  than  flow, 
a  clear  stream  of  temperamentally 
conservative  criticism,  that  clarifies 
and  purifies  and  carries  along  to  the 
ocean  of  general  appreciation  the  sweet- 
ness without  the  sediment  of  the  trou- 
bled waters  through  which  it  passes, 
while  at  the  same  time  it  tranquilly 
transports  its  own  freight  of  principles 
and  standards. 

In  other  words,  in  France  the  cur- 
rent era  has  its  esprits  delicats  as  well 
as  its  fanatics.  And  they  are  of  their 
era  and  not  merely  in  it.  With  us 
perhaps  criticism  which  accepts  stand- 
ards is  less  sensitively,  less  sympathet- 
ically, discriminating  in  its  treatment 
of  whatever  flouts  or  forgets  them. 
Mr.  Mather,  in  his  indulgence  for  the 
poetes  maudits,  for  the  abnormal,  for 
what  he  calls  "disorderly  geniuses" 
46 


TASTE 

and  "unbalanced  talents"  (see  his 
illuminating  chapter  on  the  egregious 
Greco),  is  distinctly  exceptional.  Our 
conservatives  are,  in  general,  quite 
flat-footed.  They  resemble  rather 
Professor  Conrad  Wright  who  in  his 
"History  of  French  Literature"  -  ex- 
hilaratingly,  I  think  —  announces  him- 
self a  convinced  classicist,  or  even  Mr. 
Cox  who  in  his  suggestive  and  above 
all  timely  book  has  been  thought  to 
confound  the  classic  spirit  with  the 
academic.  Let  him  not  be  disquieted. 
Mr.  Dougherty  tells  me  that  Matisse 
is  fundamentally  academic.  On  the 
other  hand  flat-footed  is  a  faint  epithet 
with  which  to  characterize  our  "ad- 
vanced" critics,  who  wring  all  withers 
when  they  are  making  the  academic 
jade  wince. 

In   contrast   take   M.   Andre   Gide. 
He  is  particularly  open-minded,  though 
he  has  plenty  of  temperamental  pre- 
47 


STANDARDS 

dilections,  and  is  quite  in  accord  with 
the  present  revolt  against  the  romantic 
without  being  in  the  least  a  neo-classi- 
cist.  His  "modernity"  in  a  word  is 
unimpeachable  by  all  save  the  par- 
tisans to  whom  modernity  and  F  esprit 
delicat  are  by  hypothesis  antithetical. 
From  these  however  his  implicit  sub- 
scription to  standards  in  his  professed 
exclusive  devotion  to  the  principle 
of  taste  does  definitely  distinguish 
him,  and  for  the  purpose  of  showing 
this  I  condense  a  few  felicitous  sen- 
tences from  one  of  his  conferences: 

"Beauty  is  secured  only  by  an  arti- 
ficial constraint.  Art  is  always  the 
result  of  constraint.  To  believe  that 
the  freer  it  is  the  higher  it  rises  is  to 
believe  that  what  keeps  the  kite  from 
mounting  is  the  string.  Art  aspires 
to  freedom  only  in  morbid  periods. 
It  loves  to  burst  its  bonds.  There- 
fore it  chooses  close  ones.  .  .  .  The 
48 


TASTE 

great  artist  is  he  to  whom  the  obstacle 
serves  as  a  spring-board." 

And  referring  to  the  "art  for  art" 
art  of  the  day  he  speaks  of  it  as  "in- 
solently isolating  itself"  and  "fatu- 
ously despising  what  it  is  too  ignorant 
to  evaluate";  of  the  artist  as  one  who 
without  external  control  is  fatally 
driven  to  "seek  only  his  own  appro- 
bation"; and  of  the  critic,  his  con- 
gener, as  "judging  works  in  the  name 
of  his  personal  taste  and  the  greater 
or  less  pleasure  they  give  him," 
which  he  manifestly  considers  a  severe 
indictment.  But  irresponsibility  is  an 
old  story  in  criticism.  Its  invasion 
of  the  far  wider  field  of  art  in  general 
is  otherwise  significant.  It  is  no  more 
needful  than  possible  or  even  desir- 
able that  every  one  should  be  a  com- 
petent critic  of  art  and  letters.  As 
well  ask  that  every  reader  should  be  a 
writer  or  every  writer  a  writer  of  criti- 
49 


STANDARDS 

cism.  But  it  is  desirable  that  every 
one  who  counts  at  all,  every  reader  of 
real  books  and  every  one  seriously 
interested  in  plastic  art  should  have 
standards  of  taste  and  possess  them 
so  thoroughly  as  to  apply  them  in- 
stinctively and  rigorously.  Otherwise 
there  is  no  logical  escape  from  the 
prospect  that  the  wider  the  appetite 
for  books  and  art  becomes  the  more 
superficial  will  be  its  appreciation  and 
the  more  worthless  will  be  the  pro- 
duction that  appeals  to  it  directly 
and  intimately  reflects  its  easy  and 
ordinary  reactions. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  self- 
expression  without  self-control  and  en- 
joyment without  standards  of  value  are 
consonant  with  the  effort  that  is  a 
prerequisite  to  real  achievement  in 
either  accomplishment  or  appreciation. 
Undisciplined  self-expression  riots  in 
the  absence  of  general  taste,  and  the 

50 


TASTE 

less  exaction  the  writer  experiences  in 
the  reader,  the  less  effort  he  expends 
in  rewarding  or  even  securing  his  atten- 
tion. The  less  demanded  by  the  be- 
holder of  the  picture,  the  statue,  the 
building,  the  quicker  the  artist's  sag 
into  inertia.  Ineptitude  may  easily 
be  quite  as  genuine  as  significance, 
and  if  genuineness  is  the  only  demand 
public  taste  makes  of  the  artist,  if  he 
is  required  to  meet  no  standards  or  - 
what  at  this  stage  of  the  world's  prog- 
ress is  the  same  thing  —  to  neglect 
all  models,  the  quality  of  his  supply 
is  bound  to  deteriorate  in  accordance 
with  as  fatal  a  law  as  that  which  makes 
water  run  down-hill. 

What  most  opposes,  however,  the 
advancement  of  this  salutary  element 
of  exacting  taste  in  our  public  is  the 
vigor  of  the  spirit  of  non-conformity, 
which  by  definition  has  no  standards, 
and  which  is  no  longer  the  affair  of 


STANDARDS 

temperament  it  used  to  be  but  is  a 
conscious  ideal.  As  such  of  course,  in 
an  emotional  era,  pursued  with  pas- 
sion, it  is  also  pursued  into  details  of 
high  differentiation  —  manners,  tastes, 
preferences,  fastidious  predilections. 
To  the  new  theology,  the  new  sincerity, 
the  new  poetry  and  painting,  the  new 
everything  in  fact  will  ultimately  no 
doubt  be  added  the  new  refinement, 
the  new  decorum.  Meantime  our  non- 
conformists are  concentrated  upon  vili- 
pending the  old.  This  is  a  field  in 
which  the  new  egotism  may  assert 
itself  with  the  minimum  of  effort 
involved  in  mere  talk  —  talk  that  as- 
serts an  independence  of  conventions 
marked  by  positive  fanaticism.  Gib- 
bon notes  with  his  accustomed  per- 
spicacity the  affinity  of  independence 
for  fanaticism,  in  remarking  the  hos- 
tility of  fanaticism  to  superstition  - 
the  bugbear  of  the  present  time.  'The 

52 


TASTE 

independent  spirit  of  fanaticism,"  he 
says  in  his  chapter  on  Mahomet, 
"looks  down  with  contempt  on  the 
ministers  and  slaves  of  superstition," 
and  the  remark  explains  the  current 
Islamic  invasion  of  the  reticences  of 
life.  Given  her  undeniably  fanatical 
independence,  for  example,  it  is  easy 
to  see  why  the  contemporary  young 
girl  of  the  thoughtful  variety  is  so 
shocked  by  the  constitution  of  society 
as  it  is,  as  to  vary  her  impassioned 
sympathy  for  the  street-walker  by 
grinding  her  teeth  at  the  thought  of 
the  Sunday-school.  But  is  it  not  a 
rather  literal  logic  that  leads  her  to 
involve  the  purely  decorative  elements 
with  the  structure  of  the  civilization 
that  has  produced  her?  Why,  for 
instance,  should  she  be  "thrilled"  by 
reading,  why  should  she  herself  write, 
that  not  inconsiderable  part  of  the 
detail  of  the  latest  fiction  that  is  else 

S3 


STANDARDS 

too  colorless  to  have  any  other  mo- 
tive than  the  purely  protestant  one  of 
heartening  the  robust  by  revolting  the 
refined  ?  The  motive  is  as  obvious  in 
trivial  as  in  grave  examples,  since  both 
may  be  equally  gross  so  far  as  taste  is 
concerned.  Observe  this  picture  in  a 
recent  clever  novel  —  by  a  lady- 
that  has  evoked  a  very  general  chorus 
of  cordial  appreciation.  Two  young 
men,  one  an  Oxonian,  occupy  con- 
jointly a  room  in  a  foreign  seaside 
hotel: 

"'I  got  out  of  bed,'  said  Hewet 
vaguely,  '  merely  to  talk,  I  suppose.' 

"'Meanwhile  I  shall  undress,'  said 
Hirst.  When  naked  of  all  but  his 
shirt  and  bent  over  the  basin,  Mr. 
Hirst  no  longer  impressed  one  with 
the  majesty  of  his  intellect,  but  with 
the  pathos  of  his  young  yet  ugly 
body. 

'Women  interest  me/  said  Hewet. 

54 


TASTE 

"'They're  so  stupid,'  said  Hirst. 
'You're  sitting  on  my  pyjamas.' 

"'I  suppose  they  are  stupid/  Hewet 
wondered. 

'There  can't  be  two  opinions  about 
that,  I  imagine,'  said  Hirst,  hopping 
briskly  across  the  room,  'unless  you're 
in  love  —  that  fat  woman  Warring- 
ton  ?'  he  inquired. 

"Not  one  fat  woman  —  all  fat  wo- 
men,' Hewet  sighed. 

"'The  women  I  saw  to-night  were 
not  fat,'  said  Hirst,  who  was  taking 
advantage  of  Hewet's  company  to 
cut  his  toe-nails." 

A  moment  later: 

" '  I  wonder  if  this  is  what  they  call 
an  ingrowing  toe-nail  ?'  said  Hirst, 
examining  the  big  toe  on  his  left 
foot." 

Another  brief  interval. 

"Hewet  contemplated  the  angular 
young  man  who  was  neatly  brushing 

55 


STANDARDS 

the  rims  of  his  toe-nails  into  the  fire- 
place in  silence  for  a  moment. 

"'I  respect  you,  Hirst/  he  re- 
marked." 

Is  there  anything  in  "Tom  Jones" 
that  strikes  quite  that  note  ?  The  pic- 
ture is  manifestly  less  a  gem  of  genre 
than  a  defiance  of  decorum,  and  as 
such  perhaps  "stimulates"  those  who 
would  find  a  dialogue  between  Achilles 
and  Patroclus  insipid.  The  writer  and 
the  sympathetic  reader  occupy  an 
attitude  which  for  them,  of  course, 
illustrates  the  new  sincerity  but  for 
others  constitutes  the  spectacle  of  a 
pose,  preoccupied  with  producing  an 
effect  while  unconscious  of  what  it 
exemplifies.  Obviously  its  sincerity, 
though  flaunted,  is  not  fundamentally 
newer  than  the  fall  of  man,  and  is 
but  a  variant  of  the  desire  to,  as  the 
French  say,  epater  le  bourgeois.  The 
new  sincerity  presents  more  drastic 
56 


TASTE 

though  not,  I  think,  more  disintegrat- 
ing phenomena.  But  one  must  draw 
the  line  somewhere  and  it  is  decorous 
to  draw  it  on  the  hither  side  of  the 
purlieus  of  pornography,  whiffs  of 
whose  un-Arabian  breezes  no  one  can 
have  escaped  and  whither  accordingly 
in  any  consideration  of  twentieth-cen- 
tury fiction  it  would,  though  easy,  be 
profitless,  because  superfluous,  to  pro- 
ceed. Here  at  least  one  may  pay  the 
tribute  of  a  wistful  regret  to  those 
days,  distant  in  all  respects  but  that 
of  time,  in  which  it  could  be  said  of 
even  the  dilettante  who  had  only 
tastes  in  matters  of  conviction  that 
he  had  in  any  case  convictions  in 
matters  of  taste. 

Dress  affords  a  more  agreeable  field 
of  reflection  and  has  the  advantage 
for  our  purpose  of  illustrating  the 
same  phenomenon  of  impatience  with 
standards  of  decorum.  Here  we  can 

57 


STANDARDS 

see  how  superficial  it  is  to  denounce 
the  insufficiency  of  old  standards  for 
the  new  duties  taught  by  new  occa- 
sions, and  perceive  how  much  more 
consistent  it  is  to  demand  the  aboli- 
tion of  standards  altogether.  In  a 
word,  how  fashions  differ  from  stand- 
ards, and  how  exacting  is  the  tyranny 
which  replaces  the  slavery  of  conven- 
tion with  the  despotism  of  whim. 
The  aspect  of  "this  changing  world" 
presented  by  its  habiliments  is  in- 
deed such  as  to  arouse  "unprecedented 
emotion."  Already,  to  be  sure,  there 
are  signs  of  even  more  change,  but 
since  it  is  manifestly  to  be  progressive 
instead  of  purely  haphazard  we  know 
whither  we  are  drifting  and  that  the 
need,  for  purely  emotional  apprecia- 
tion will  remain  stable.  The  current 
affinity  of  the  bottom  of  the  skirt 
for  that  of  the  decolletage  is  destined 
no  doubt  to  a  richer  realization,  owing 

58 


TASTE 

to  what  we  are  now  calling  an  "in- 
tensive" conviction  of  the  truth  that 
"the  body  is  more  than  raiment." 
And  as  we  are  to  be,  above  all  things, 
natural  and  as,  except  for  artists, 
the  female  form  is  the  loveliest  thing 
in  nature,  we  not  only  have  the  pros- 
pect of  still  further  emotional  felicity 
in  the  immediate  future,  but  may 
look  forward  with  the  gentle  altruism 
of  resignation  to  the  increase  of  man- 
kind's stock  of  happiness  in  a  remoter 
hereafter  —  in  the  spirit  of  the  French 
seer,  who,  on  the  eve  of  the  Revolu- 
tion, exclaimed:  " Les  jeunes  gens  sont 
bien  heureux ;  Us  verront  de  belles 
choses."  We  know  how  Madame 
Tallien  justified  him. 

Undress,  too,  as  well  as  dress,  holds 
out  an  alluring  prospect,  at  least  in 
fiction,  in  which  the  imagination  is 
already  very  considerably  "stimu- 
lated" by  what  the  eye  is  condemned 
59 


STANDARDS 

to  forego  in  fact.  No  community 
has,  of  course,  as  yet  adopted  the 
Virgilian  motto  half-heartedly  sug- 
gested by  Hawthorne  for  Brook  Farm: 
Nudus  ara,  sere  nudus,  but  fiction 
may  be  said  to  front  that  way.  Mr. 
Galsworthy  is  only  the  most  dis- 
tinguished of  those  who  enable  their 
readers  to  emulate  Actaeon  at  their 
ease,  and  we  are  constantly  assisting 
at  the  bath  of  beauty  in  company 
with  lady  novelists  to  whom  the  ex- 
perience must  naturally  seem  less  sen- 
sational, but  who  are  especially  sensi- 
tive to  the  desirability  of  being  "in 
the  swim,"  if  not  reckless  of  becoming 
what  Shelley  calls  "naked  to  laughter" 
in  the  process. 

Nor  will  our  successors  be  confined 
to  the  delights  of  the  eye.  The  world 
of  sensation  is  acquiring  among  us,  in 
various  ways,  a  new  extension,  as  our 
fiction,  again,  amply  shows.  The  par- 
60 


TASTE 

ticular  sense  of  smell,  for  example,  is 
being  rescued  from  neglect  and  re- 
ceiving a  recognition  long  withheld 
by  puritan  fastidiousness.  Its  inspira- 
tion proceeds  less  from  Keats's  ex- 
ample or  Max  Beerbohm's  advocacy, 
perhaps,  than  from  Maupassant,  whom 
our  later  fictionists  wisely  study,  I 
believe,  without  always  studying  wise- 
ly, and  of  whom  Henry  James  re- 
marks that  "human  life  in  his  pages 
appears  for  the  most  part  as  a  con- 
cert of  odors,"  owing  to  a  sense  of 
smell  "as  acute  as  that  of  those  ani- 
mals of  the  field  and  forest  whose 
subsistence  and  security  depend  upon 
it."  The  heroine  of  an  essentially 
charming  recent  novel  has  "a  mo- 
ment" that  "was  forever  connected 
in  her  mind  with  the  smell  of  delicate 
food  and  fading  flowers  and  human 
beings  well  washed  and  groomed  which 
floated  out  to  her  from  the  dining- 
61 


STANDARDS 

room."  Every  one  knows  the  per- 
sistent associations  of  odors,  and  the 
house-party  was  a  large  one.  Be- 
sides people  wash  much  more  than 
they  used  to  and  their  aura  deserves 
more  attention.  However  the  neg- 
ligent are  not  neglected.  The  young 
lady,  whose  father  is  a  socialist,  has 
already  had  an  experience  of  a  differ- 
ent sort  —  the  odor  of  a  showy  hotel 
court  in  which  "everything  in  sight 
exhaled  an  intense  consciousness  of 
high  cost  .  .  .  suggesting  to  a  sensi- 
tive nose  another  smell,  obscured  but 
rancidly  perceptible  —  the  unwashed 
smell  floating  up  from  the  paupers' 
cellars  which  support  Aladdin's  pal- 
aces of  luxury."  Taste  may  surely 
be  too  rigid  and  in  any  case  its  limits 
include  those  temperamental  prefer- 
ences which,  like  colors,  are  prover- 
bially exempt  from  disputation.  No 
doubt  there  is  more  gain  than  loss  in 
62 


TASTE 

enlisting  a  new  sense  in  the  service  of 
literature.  But  it  would  be  fatuity 
to  expect  it  to  conserve  its  freshness 
long.  Odors  evaporate.  This  kind  of 
spontaneity  is  especially  in  danger  of 
prompt  conventionalization  —  like  any 
new  perfume  —  its  raison  d'etre  being 
too  obscure  to  be  kept  vividly  in  mind 
and  the  sensuous  satisfaction  it  affords 
tending  rapidly  to  lose  its  edge  in  be- 
coming staple.  And  there  would  be 
much  more  prospect  of  its  serving 
the  ends  of  taste  in  general  if  what  is 
staple  were  also  standard. 


IV 

THE  INDIVIDUAL 

THE  staple  is  often  however  far 
from  being  standard.  Nearly 
two  generations  ago  Arnold  cited  Re- 
nan  as  saying:  "All  ages  have  had 
their  inferior  literature  but  the  great 
danger  of  our  time  is  that  this  in- 
ferior literature  tends  more  and  more 
to  get  the  upper  place."  Applied  to 
our  own  time  the  remark  would  lose 
none  of  its  justice.  It  would  need 
indeed  a  sharper  edge  in  view  of  one 
particular  phase  which  not  only  the 
literary  movement  but  the  whole  in- 
tellectual flux  has  assumed  since  Re- 
nan's  day  and  which  with  all  his 
pessimistic  distrust  of  democracy  Re- 
nan  himself  could  'not  have  foreseen 
in  its  acuteness.  This  phase  is  marked 
64 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

not  merely  by  the  numerical  pre- 
ponderance of  mediocrity,  which  alone 
he  and  kindred  spirits  deplored -- al- 
most cravenly  as  it  seemed  at  the 
time  —  but  by  mediocrity  invigorated 
by  the  current  aimless  yet  abounding 
vitality,  which  gives  it  a  force  medi- 
ocrity heretofore  has  never  even  con- 
ceived of  itself  as  possessing.  Ours 
is  the  day  of  the  majority  but  there  is 
nothing  invidious  in  ascribing  medi- 
ocrity to  the  majority  in  the  intellec- 
tual sphere.  One  may  acknowledge 
it  with  the  same  wry  frankness  with 
which  Thackeray  discoursed  of  snobs. 
As  Henley,  who  certainly  did  not  suffer 
from  morbid  self-disparagement,  once 
wrote  me:  "We  are  all  too  damnably 
second-rate."  What  is  new  is  the  ex-j 
traordinary  self-respect  that  medioc- 1 
rity  has  suddenly  acquired. 

It  is   no  doubt   as   an  unconscious 
corollary  of  the  quickened  sense  of  the 
65 


STANDARDS 

dignity  of  the  individual  as  such  - 
something  which  can  hardly  perhaps  be 
too  much  insisted  on  in  the  social  and 
political  field  —  that  in  the  intellec- 
tual field  also  the  individual  as  such 
is  felt  to  have  his  rights.  The  new 
humanity  should  add  a  chapter  about 
it,  to  bring  its  gospel  up  to  date.  De- 
mocracy is  to  my  sense  the  finest  thing 
in  the  secular  world,  but  in  a  cosmic 
universe  there  is  a  place  for  everything 
and  it  should  keep  its  place.  For  it  is 
not  after  all  the  more  obvious  charac- 
teristics of  our  public  considered  as  a 
whole  —  its  heterogeneousness,  its  in- 
stinctive preference  of  the  novel  to 
the  standardized  and  its  restive  recal- 
citrancy to  the  restrictions  of  taste  - 
that  give  the  cause  of  art  and  letters 
at  the  present  time  an  especial  claim 
on  our  attention.  Considered  in  the 
mass  a  mercurial  public  may  con- 
spicuously fail  in  its  duty  to  this 
66 


THE   INDIVIDUAL 

cause,  but  being  mercurial  it  is  sus- 
ceptible of  transformation.  The  char- 
acter of  the  individuals  composing  it 
is  the  more  fundamental  considera- 
tion. And  this  is  something  that  is 
forced  on  our  attention  more  fre- 
quently and  more  forcibly  than  the 
general  traits  which  it  requires  more 
effort  to  synthetize. 

The  modern  individual  is,  to  begin 
with,  under  some  misconception  as 
to  his  own  nature  which  he  has  some- 
how come  to  conceive  as  that  of  a 
highly  organized  personality.  Reflec- 
tion would  assure  him  however  that 
mere  individuality  is  a  matter  of  the 
will,  personality  of  the  character. 
One  can  be  propagated  by  mere 
fission;  the  other  cannot  even  be 
inherited.  One  synthetizes  individual 
traits;  the  other  divides  without  dis- 
tinguishing one  individual  from  an- 
other —  sheep,  for  example.  Unlike 
67 


STANDARDS 

individualism  which  is  a  doctrine,  per- 
sonality cannot  be  preached;  legiti- 
mately there  is  no  such  word  as  "per- 
sonalism."  In  a  work  of  art,  it  has 
been  observed,  personality  is  not  what 
you  put  in  but  what  you  can't  keep 
out.  One  opposes  the  standardiza- 
tion which  the  other  eludes.  Though 
the  impression  made  by  each  must 
be  measured  by  standards  of  value, 
they  differ  constitutionally  as  the  in- 
dependent spirit  differs  from  the  in- 
tuitive. Thus  personality  not  only 
need  lose  none  of  its  character  but 
may  even  intensify  its  force  in  the 
conformity  that  independence  feels  as 
a  fetter.  Raphael's  personality  is  as 
accentuated  as  Blake's,  Torquemada's 
energy  as  great  as  Luther's.  Indi- 
vidualism as  such  is  shut  off  from 
following  ideals  that  are  not  less  at- 
tractive for  having  attracted  others. 
Personality  is  surely  the  most  inter- 
68 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

esting,  the  ultimate  element  of  any 
form  of  expression.  It  begins  where 
the  others  leave  off.  To  prescribe 
it,  however,  is  absurd,  since  to  define 
it  is  impossible.  In  character  it  is 
an  abstraction  equally  applicable  to 
all  personalities  and  concretely  as  un- 
characterizable  as  its  phenomena  are 
apparent;  imponderable  as  a  perfume, 
impalpable  as  a  presence.  On  the 
other  hand  its  extreme  attenuation  or 
even  its  complete  absence  is  quite 
as  conspicuous  in  many  individuals 
whose  claims  to  its  possession  are 
aggressively  asserted.  I  have  labored 
the  point  because  it  is  in  virtue  of 
his  assumed  personality  -  -  always  an 
exceptional  possession  —  that  the  mod- 
ern individual  —  who  is  not  excep- 
tional at  all  —  asserts  his  title  to  a 
special  sanction  for  his  activities  in 
either  production  or  appreciation. 
Naturally  independence  is  his  cen- 
69 


STANDARDS 

tral  ideal,  which  incidentally  accounts 
for  the  disintegration  of  the  public  he 
composes.  He  deems  it  his  duty  to 
live  his  own  life,  to  do  his  own  think- 
ing —  unaware  of  the  handicap  he 
involuntarily  assumes  in  doing  so. 
When  Arnold  observed  that  "man  wor- 
ships best  in  common;  he  philosophizes 
best  alone,"  what  he  had  in  mind  was 
that  it  is  best  to  do  one's  thinking  in 
solitude  —  solitude  rather  than  inde- 
pendence. Thinking  for  oneself  meant 
to  him  that  neglect  of  the  thinking  of 
others  which  produces  less  the  thinker 
than  the  thinkist  —  to  adopt  a  useful 
distinction;  a  result  that  his  prescrip- 
tion of  culture,  which  he  defined  as 
the  knowledge  of  others'  thinking,  was 
particularly  designed  to  prevent.  The 
subject  in  fact  suggested  to  him  the 
anecdote  of  Mrs.  Shelley  exclaiming  to 
a  friend  who  advised  her  to  send  her 
son  to  a  school  where  he  would  be 
70 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

taught  to  think  for  himself:  "Oh,  my 
God !  send  him  where  they  will  teach 
him  to  think  like  other  people."  One 
can  understand  that  Mrs.  Shelley 
should  speak  feelingly.  As  to  wor- 
ship we  have  to  a  very  considerable 
extent  replaced  the  communion  of  the 
saints,  of  which  Arnold  was  undoubt- 
edly thinking,  by  a  division  of  the 
community  into  two  distinct  and  in- 
terhostile  sects  of  secular  schismatics, 
one  adoring  the  golden  calf  and  the 
other  incensing  the  under  dog.  Natu- 
rally for  standards  that  unite  we  have 
shibboleths  that  divide.  But  when 
we  come  to  philosophizing  around  and 
across  this  central  line  of  cleavage  the 
independence  of  our  thinking  is  fatal 
to  conformity  in  far  greater  detail. 
We  fairly  whirl  in  centrifugal  discus- 
sion which  contemplates  agreement  as 
little  as  it  achieves  it.  The  evil  of 
repressing  free  thought  is  felt  at  once, 


STANDARDS 

but  the  blessings  of  encouraging  it 
are  largely  reserved  for  Bacon's  "next 
ages,"  owing  to  its  deliquescence  in 
free  speech.  The  spirit  of  the  forum 
has  invaded  the  household,  where, 
however,  even  forensic  standards  cower 
before  the  eminently  unparliamentary 
contentiousness  concentrated  around 
the  hearth. 

All  this  is  of  course  marked  by  vi- 
tality but  it  is  permitted  to  hope  that 
uncrystallized  by  standards  it  may  not 
prove  viable.  It  may  yet  crumble  in 
dissatisfaction  under  some  sudden  il- 
lumination of  our  prevailing  self-ador- 
ing introspection.  Arnold  himself  em- 
ployed a  short  and  easy  formula  of 
consolation  when  depressed  by  the 
way  the  world  was  going.  "The  in- 
stinct for  self-preservation  in  human- 
ity" would,  he  thought,  ultimately 
reorient  it.  Unhappily  some  of  the 
effects  of  Emerson's  law  of  compen- 
72 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

sation  are  to  be  counted  on  only  by 
deferred  hope  and  in  the  longest  of 
long  runs.  The  forces  of  disintegra- 
tion, in  which  individual  independence 
is  disguised  only  from  itself  by  the 
cloak  of  socialist  theory,  have  an  in- 
definite future  before  them  if  they 
consolidate  by  still  greater  numbers 
the  conquests  their  numbers  have  al- 
ready made  in  virtue  not  of  their 
quality  but  of  their  numerousness. 

The  proverbial  egotism  of  the  young, 
to  whom  no  doubt  the  world's  progress 
is  chiefly  due,  is  perhaps  a  source  of 
strength  to  them  in  their  work  of 
amelioration  and  advance.  Modesty 
is  doubt,  says  Balzac,  and  egotism 
gives  them  the  requisite  confidence 
in  a  world  largely  given  over  to  the 
grosso  modo  in  its  struggles  upward. 
But  the  most  sympathetic  observer  of 
their  attitude  and  activities  at  the 
present  time  must  note  a  fundamental 
73 


STANDARDS 

change  in  this  advantageous  quality 
-  a  transformation  of  force  into 
ferocity  modified  by  fatuousness.  The 
old  feel  the  effects  of  this  in  many 
pathetic  ways  inevitable  in  the  sup- 
planting of  general  standards  by  ego- 
tistic ideals.  It  is  a  common  experi- 
ence that  the  domestic  affections 
suffer  from  it.  The  Gospel  conflict 
of  the  daughter-in-law  against  her 
mother-in-law  is  a  customary  and 
chronic  affair  compared  with  the  cur- 
rent cleavage  between  entire  genera- 
tions—  in  its  completeness  an  alto- 
gether new  thing,  I  think,  under  the 
sun.  The  domestic  conflict  is  no  doubt 
a  derivative  of  our  highly  individualist 
predatory  socialism,  whose  admirable 
sentimental  humanity  is  rationally  so 
markedly  modified  by  the  natural 
man's  very  natural  desire  for  a  share 
in  the  plutocrat's  "swag,"  and  whose 
disintegrating  disposition  to  substi- 

74 


THE   INDIVIDUAL 

tute  the  individual  for  the  family  as 
the  social  unit  follows  the  injunction 
to  be  off  with  the  old  love  before  being 
on  with  the  new  so  enthusiastically 
as  to  kick  it  down-stairs  before  even 
dissembling  its  love.  This  seems  less 
prudent  but  more  logical  than  are 
our  belligerent  pacifists,  its  congeners, 
who  are  for  having  men  fall  into  the 
arms — and  apparently  the  ammuni- 
tion— of  their  brothers  abroad  while 
continuing  to  dynamite  their  enemies 
at  home.  But  in  sacrificing  to  the 
individual,  one  the  family  and  the 
other  the  nation,  both  illustrate  the 
same  egotistic  tendency. 

The  fireside  conflict  is  noticeably 
embittered  by  the  failure  of  youth  to 
consider  how  much  more  crowded  the 
pigeonholes  of  age  are  than  its  own, 
and  how  much  more  irksome  it  is, 
accordingly,  to  rearrange  their  con- 
tents; and  by  the  failure  of  age  to 

•       75 


STANDARDS 

bear  in  mind  that  principle  of  pleas- 
ing which  renders  it  necessary,  as 
Scherer  observes,  to  learn  many  things 
that  one  knows  from  those  who  are 
ignorant  of  them.  The  old  will  yield, 
victims  of  a  feebler  egotism,  encum- 
bered with  standards  prohibiting  self- 
regardant  ideals,  less  concerned  about 
living  their  own  lives  and  preserving 
their  sacrosanct  individualities  than 
haunted  by  dread  of  losing  the  love 
of  their  loved  ones,  and  even  in  their 
benefactions  sceptical  about  any  real 
presence  in  the  stone  of  "free  verse" 
and  "free  art"  proffered  now  so  prod- 
igally to  those  asking  for  bread. 
^Esthetic  activity  as  an  alleviation 
of  the  ills  of  the  proletariat  they  find 
a  baffling  conception.  And  they  in- 
stinctively shy  at  the  "free  living" 
of  which  they  have  never  experienced 
the  delights  and  have  only  observed 
the  disadvantages.  They  must  also 
76 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

very  generally  be  hamstrung  by  com- 
punction, reflecting  whose  fault  it  all 
largely  is.  The  mother  whose  child 
a  visitor  noticed  hacking  the  furniture 
and  who  replied  with  composure  to 
the  latter's  concern  about  it  that  the 
child  was  "merely  expressing  herself/' 
merely  herself  illustrated  a  rather  gen- 
eral practice  during  the  formative  years 
of  contemporary  youth — owing  per- 
haps to  a  parental  partiality  for  Boeo- 
tian precedents,  including  that  of  sow- 
ing serpent's  teeth.  Similarly  with 
what  may  be  called  the  secondary  social 
education  received  by  the  present  gen- 
eration, and  even  with  titular  educa- 
tion itself,  as  I  have  already  intimated, 
with  its  supplanting  of  standards  of 
culture  by  ideals  that  further  the 
withering  of  the  world,  as  heretofore 
comprehended,  and  the  exaltation  more 
and  more  of  the  individual,  as  now 
apotheosized. 

77 


STANDARDS 

Any  friction  springing  from  this 
assertion  of  individual  independence 
is,  however,  lightly  excused  to  the 
conscience  of  those  to  whom  it  is  due 
by  what  is  called,  and  immensely 
prized  as — since  moral  considerations 
are  inescapable — the  "new  sincerity." 
Yet  the  new  sincerity  can  be  no 
advance  on  the  old  unless  it  is  merely 
meant  that  there  is  more  of  it.  Even 
so,  in  the  realm  of  the  intelligence 
sincerity  is  but  an  elementary  vir- 
tue. It  is  often  the  hardest  thing  to 
forgive,  as  when,  for  example,  it  is 
vaunted  as  a  superior  substitute  for 
intelligence  itself.  The  common  asser- 
tion of  respect  for  another's  convic- 
tions on  account  of  their  sincerity 
in  spite  of  disagreement  with  them  is 
but  an  instance  of  confused  thinking. 
You  respect  the  person  for  this  rea- 
son, not  his  convictions.  If  he  is  a 
person  whose  mental  machinery  in 
78 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

general  is  qualified  for  the  construc- 
tion of  good  ones,  you  respect  them 
because  in  virtue  of  that  fact  they 
may  be  sound.  The  convictions  of 
such  a  person  may  even  affect  your 
own.  The  case  occasionally  occurs, 
no  doubt,  though  rare  in  these  days 
of  controversial  acrimony  unfavorable 
to  deference  in  any  discussion.  But 
sincerity  has  nothing  to  do  with  it. 
The  most  that  can  be  said  for  sin- 
cerity here  is  that  a  person  who  is 
sincere  with  himself  is  apt,  other 
things  being  equal,  to  have  superior 
light.  Sincerity  with  oneself  however 
is  not  what  is  meant  and  doubtless 
is  as  infrequent  in  the  new  sincerity, 
which  is  rather  violent  and  emotional, 
as  in  the  old  —  which  also,  being  less 
conscious,  is  less  constrained,  more  a 
habit  than  an  attitude  and  less  open 
to  self-deception  through  self-interest 
in  holding  the  pose. 

79 


STANDARDS 

In  any  case  pluming  oneself  on  the 
outspokenness  which  spares  no  sen- 
sibilities is  only  a  way  of  turning 
offensiveness  into  a  virtue  by  focussing 
one's  attention  on  oneself  and  is  but 
one  more  detail  of  the  seriousness 
with  which  the  modern  individ- 
ual contemplates  his  individuality. 
" There  have  been  heroes,"  says  Tho- 
reau,  "for  whom  this  world  seemed 
expressly  prepared,"  and  beside  whose 
"pure  primeval  natures"  "the  dis- 
tinctions of  morality,  of  right  and 
wrong,  sense  and  nonsense,  are  petty 
and  have  lost  their  significance." 
Even  in  the  days  of  transcendentalism 
these  heroes  were  probably  background 
figures  in  the  tapestry  of  time.  Now 
they  are  all  around  us.  Sitting  of  old 
on  the  heights  they  have  stepped  down 
with  Freedom  herself  through  town 
and  field,  though  far  less  scornful  than 
their  august  associate  of  the  false- 
80 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

hood  of  extremes.  The  individual  of 
course  conceives  genius  to  be  far  com- 
moner than  heretofore  in  consequence 
of  the  removal  of  old  shackles,  and  he 
discovers  it  on  every  hand.  He  is 
saved  from  the  fatuity  of  claiming 
it  for  himself -- where  he  is  so  saved 
-  by  asserting  all  the  same  his  rights 
to  its  privileges.  But  his  vital  urge 
is  so  insistent,  his  belief  in  self-expres- 
sion so  profound,  as  to  make  it  not 
unnatural  for  him  to  suspect  in  him- 
self heroic  potentialities.  The  Whit- 
man-like warmth  of  expansion  he 
feels  for  his  fellows,  glorifying  them 
so  generously  in  the  mass  as  to 
see  them  individually  aureoled  in 
the  common  effulgence,  must  in  self- 
defense  increase  his  self-respect.  If 
there  is  the  democracy  of  Pericles 
there  is  also  that  of  Cleon  and  the 
pyschology  of  the  latter  is  not  ob- 
scure. 

Si 


STANDARDS 

The  individual  character  of  our  vari- 
ety of  socialism,  loosely  and  untechni- 
cally  so-called,  keeps  it  within  senti- 
mental limits  and  confines  it  to  an 
altruism  which  differs  from  what  used 
to  be  known  merely  as  unselfishness 
mainly  in  the  greater  freedom  from 
self-discipline  and  the  wider  field  for 
self-expansion  in  energies  consecrated 
by  benevolence  but  comforted  by  self- 
esteem.  And  it  is  easy  to  see  how 
our  latter-day  luxuriance  of  poets  and 
artists  and  novelists  has  flowered  out 
of  the  new  and  broader  conception  of 
the  dignity  of  the  individual,  which 
eliminates  the  sense  of  responsibility 
imposed  by  subscription  to  standards 
born  of  an  interest  in  the  welfare  of 
organic  mankind.  Such  a  sentiment 
as  that  of  Aurora  Leigh,  who  it  may 
still  be  remembered  had  devoted  a 
good  deal  of  reflection  to  art  and  life 
and  to  philanthropy  as  well: 
82 


THE   INDIVIDUAL 

"  Better  far 

Pursue  a  frivolous  trade  by  serious  means, 
Than  a  sublime  art  frivolously" 

has  now  almost  as  quaint  a  sound  as 
the  even  older  observation, 

"But  wealth  is  crime  enough  to  him  that's 
poor." 

So  far  as  benevolence  is  concerned, 
however,  it  must  be  acknowledged 
that  self-esteem  was  never  more  abun- 
dantly justified.  Probably  there  never 
was  a  time  in  which  there  was  so  much 
warrant  for  a  wide-spread  secular  feel- 
ing comparable  to  that  which  the  young 
man  of  great  possessions  would  have 
enjoyed  had  he  taken  the  counsel 
he  sought.  To  deny  the  need  of  new 
standards  for  new  phenomena  would 
indeed  exemplify  a  smugness  exagger- 
atedly Victorian  —  to  employ  the  stig- 
ma so  lavishly  affixed  to  their  own  nest 
83 


STANDARDS 

by  the  Stymphalidae  of  the  day.  And 
the  most  conspicuous  advance  that 
can  be  chronicled  is  the  penetration 
by  the  democratic  spirit  of  society 
in  general  so  as  appreciably  to  have 
increased  the  sympathy  between  classes 
and  stations  in  life.  Secular  society 
has  certainly  organized  its  benevo- 
lences on  a  larger  scale  and  to  better 
effect  than  ever  before.  Hawthorne 
was  incorrigible  and  no  doubt,  had 
he  written  in  the  present  era,  would 
still  have  found  a  "Blithedale  Ro- 
mance" to  write.  But  he  could  not 
now  have  written  "The  good  of  others, 
like  our  own  happiness,  is  not  to  be 
attained  by  direct  effort  but  inci- 
dentally," without  considerably  quali- 
fying this  comfortable  half-truth  in 
view  of  the  multifarious  benevolent 
agencies  now  everywhere  successfully 
at  work.  The  great  changes  since  his 
day  in  material  conditions,  and  the  es- 
84 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

tablishment  of  practically  permanent 
inequalities,  have  naturally  evoked  such 
agencies,  and  made  strictly  contrac- 
tual ethics  —  first  formulated  by  the 
first  murderer  —  seem  inadequate  save 
to  pharisaism,  power  and  its  parasites. 
But  as  regards  the  individual  the 
psychology  of  "service"  is  still  un- 
settled. The  ideal  has  largely  sup- 
planted that  of  mere  duty-- hitherto 
proverbially  "the  law  of  human  life." 
"Service"  as  often  illustrated  is  too 
compact  of  energy  and  emotion  to 
submit  to  the  discipline  now  felt  to 
be  so  devitalizing,  but  heretofore  a 
prime  factor  in  the  development  of 
character  of  standard  weight  and  fine- 
ness. Its  consciousness  has  awarded 
it  indulgences  that  have  pushed  all 
notion  of  penance  into  the  background. 
Du  sollst  entbehren  expresses  an  idea 
rarely  heard  of  now  save  as  necessarily 
involved  in  the  pursuit  of  some  prac- 
85 


STANDARDS 

tical  utility.  The  popular  literature 
of  philanthropy  is  fiercely  polemic. 
Its  claims  for  others  are  not  obscurely 
associated  with  the  conviction  that  its 
own  have  an  equal  warrant.  The  main- 
tenance of  rights --less  justified  by 
the  human  consciousness  than  duties, 
and  only  logically  deducible  as  rights 
from  the  duties  toward  us  of  others  - 
often  appears  as  the  assertion  of  such 
claims.  Moreover  the  reverse  of  the 
medal  is  apt  to  monopolize  the  atten- 
tion and  the  emotion  of  our  host  of 
amateur  humanitarians,  who  "thrill" 
far  more  readily  in  response  to  the 
idea  of  wrongs  than  to  that  of  their 
constructive  righting.  As  a  recent  poet 
sings: 

"It  is  a  joy  to  curse  a  wrong." 

Indignation  is  the  most  self-indulgent 

of   the    passions  —  at    least    of   those 

which    may    also    be    virtues.     It    re- 

86 


THE  INDIVIDUAL 

quires  no  tension.  The  gentlest  souls 
sag  into  its  luxurious  embrace  by  mere 
relaxation,  though  remaining  too  long 
they  undoubtedly  discover  it  to  be 
one  of  those  things  of  which  one  may 
have  too  much  and  suffer  accordingly 
-  as  do  their  friends.  Nothing  in 
fact  is  more  characteristic  of  the  com- 
plicated psychology  of  service  pur- 
sued with  enthusiasm  than  a  certain 
savagery,  subtly  intensified  by  the 
self-righteousness  that  lies  in  wait  for 
any  altruism  that  is  absorbing.  And 
we  may  say  that  the  philanthropic 
movement  itself  has  become  popular- 
ized, as  it  could  hardly  have  been  other- 
wise, by  the  affinity  of  a  certain  side 
of  it  for  a  particularly  alluring  form 
of  original  sin.  Naturally  our  fiction 
reflects  it  as  it  does  the  other  ego- 
tistic phenomena  of  our  individualist 
independence.  Accordingly,  owing  to 
its  preoccupation  with  the  superficial- 
8? 


STANDARDS 

ities  of  self-expression  and  of  efferent 
energies  so  exclusively,  we  have  had 
in  recent  years  very  little  of  it  dealing 
with  the  inner  life. 


88 


V 
THE  INNER  LIFE 

A  DELIGHTFUL    character   in    a 
recent  delightful  story  thus  un- 
packs her  elderly  heart  about  the  youth 
of  the  day: 

"  Bless  me,  they  all  seem  to  me  very 
worthy  and  very  clever.  They  talk 
a  great  deal  about  humanity  and  what 
is  good  or  bad  for  it,  but  the  drawback 
is  that  they  aren't  human  themselves. 
Besides  they  have  no  sense  of  what  is 
congruous.  They  belittle  big  ques- 
tions by  discussing  them  in  season 
and  out  of  season.  Now  no  surround- 
ings are  incongruous  to  one's  thoughts. 
One  can  think  of  anything  anywhere, 
but  you  can't  talk  of  anything  any- 
where; at  least  you  can't  if  you  have 
any  sense  —  I'm  not  sure  whether  to 
89 


STANDARDS 

say  of  decorum  or  of  humor.  .  .  .  The 
present  generation  all  seem  to  me  to 
have  the  lust  of  speech.  No  sooner  do 
they  think  a  little  thought  than  they 
are  in  a  desperate  hurry  to  proclaim 
it  far  and  wide.  If  no  one  hears  it 
they  feel  it  is  wasted.  They  don't 
seem  to  take  into  account  the  immense 
importance  of  the  thoughts  that  are 
not  spoken,  and  consequently  there  is 
no  background  to  what  they  do  say." 
The  disappearance  of  the  inner  life 
could  not  be  more  cogently  chronicled. 
The  practice  here  implied  of  putting 
the  stock  instead  of  the  samples  into 
the  show-window  dissipates  the  per- 
fume of  personality  inseparable  from 
the  radiation  of  the  inner  life --just 
as  in  art  it  sacrifices  the  suggestive- 
ness  that  is  of  such  signal  interest  to 
all  minds  but  those  devoid  of  associa- 
tion, blank  of  memory,  and  bereft  of 
imagination.  And  just  as,  according 
90 


THE  INNER  LIFE 

to  Stevenson,  one  of  the  conquests  of 
romanticism  over  the  classic  stark- 
ness,  the  change  from  Fielding  to 
Scott,  as  he  noted,  was  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  background,  so  the  develop- 
ment of  the  personality  in  richness, 
in  solidity,  in  seriousness,  in  every- 
thing worth  while,  in  a  word,  depends 
upon  the  background  in  which  self- 
respect  supports  the  more  salient  self- 
activities,  the  background  secured  by 
reticence  and  reserve  and  secured  by 
them  alone.  Reserve  is  as  important 
to  a  character  of  any  force  as  reserves 
to  an  army.  The  "little  thoughts" 
of  real  thinkers  are  otherwise  consider- 
able than  those  Mrs.  Pimblett  had  in 
mind  precisely  because  they  have  back- 
ing. What  characterizes  the  trans- 
formation of  romanticism  in  its  turn 
into  naturalism  a  outrance  is*  in  fact 
consciousness  of  the  foreground.  Life 
is  brought  into  a  single  plane  and  that 
91 


STANDARDS 

plane  too  close  for  an  agreeable  per- 
spective. And  consciousness  of  the 
foreground  necessarily  obtrudes  con- 
sciousness itself —  always  something 
to  be  dissembled  in  the  interest  of 
both  life  and  art.  Carlyle's  insistence 
that  it  ought  to  be  suppressed  alto- 
gether is,  I  think,  an  extreme  view. 
But  intensified  into  self-consciousness 
it  is  surely  a  foreign  element  that 
should  be  kept  out  of  the  picture.  It 
is  also  sand  in  the  artist's  machinery. 
And  there  is  enough  of  it  at  present 
in  life  as  well  as  in  art  to  be  awkwardly 
apparent,  and  involve  much  discom- 
fort to  the  spectator. 

Our  lack  of  personal  reserve  is  in- 
deed in  not  only  the  self-conscious 
but  the  polemic  stage,  and  even  more 
aggressive  than  awkward.  The  cur- 
rent ideal  of  being  both  naked  and 
unashamed  has  no  precedent  later 
than  that  of  the  Garden  of  Eden, 
92 


THE   INNER   LIFE 

when,  too,  the  basis  of  serenity  in 
these  circumstances  was  physical  inno- 
cence rather  than  moral  insensibility. 
An  itching  for  publicity  is  no  doubt  an 
integral  trait  of  the  unregenerate  na- 
ture, but  in  its  present  development 
besides  illustrating  a  propensity  un- 
leashed it  appears  as  a  positive  prop- 
aganda, vaunting  the  superior  claims 
of  its  gospel  and  delighting  in  the 
dismay  of  dissenters.  The  only  obli- 
gation attached  to  "living  one's  own 
life  "  is  apparently  that  of  living  it  in 
public.  This  is  particularly  one  of 
the  by-products  of  the  feminist  move- 
ment which  has  done  so  much  for  those 
who  need  it  and  so  little  for  those  who 
do  not.  "  Men  serve  women  kneeling," 
says  Thackeray;  "when  they  get  on 
their  feet  they  go  away."  More  go 
away,  it  is  said,  than  formerly;  per- 
haps because  less  needed  they  feel 
less  wanted.  One  of  the  most  success- 
93 


STANDARDS 

ful  lives  I  have  known  is  that  of  a 
modern  Cornelia,  whose  jewels,  quite 
openly,  consider  it  rather  a  failure 
because  it  has  no  literary,  art,  public 
uplift,  or  other  forensic  laurels  to  crown 
it.  This  stage  is  no  doubt  a  transi- 
tory one  and  one  need  not  linger  over 
the  kind  of  taste  it  betrays.  The  next 
may  see  sufficient  sense  winnowed  by 
the  threshing  of  old  sillinesses  of  arti- 
ficial reserves  and  overnice  reticences 
to  constitute  a  new  composure  that 
will  be  an  advance  on  the  old.  Mean- 
time one  mainly  notes  that  these 
reformations,  proceeding  by  reaction, 
proceed  slowly,  and  that  the  present 
crisis  of  suspension  of  standards 
through  the  mere  enthusiasm  of  en- 
ergy would  be  advantageously  short- 
ened by  an  even  greater  development 
of  self-consciousness  —  to  the  point, 
namely,  where  one  perceives  the  figure 
he  is  cutting  while  engaged  in  savoring 

94 


THE   INNER   LIFE 

the  satisfaction  he  achieves.  In  which 
case  our  fiction,  for  example,  would 
display  less  of  what  even  the  public 
ward  of  the  maternity  hospital  screens, 
and  would  be  freer  from  those  intimate 
ineptitudes  that  are  only  paraded  in 
letters  because  they  are  curtained  in 
life. 

The  life  of  the  senses,  it  is  true,  has 
had  at  times  the  advantage  over  pure- 
ly routine  existence  of  having  a  pos- 
itive ideal  of  its  own  and  therefore  its 
own  standards.  In  the  antique  world 
it  developed  a  philosophy  of  extreme 
refinement.  No  social  trait  of  pre- 
Revolutionary  France  is  more  familiar 
than  that  absence  of  grossness  through 
which  vice  lost  half  its  evil.  Our  own 
recent  awakening  to  this  life  has  been 
enthusiastic,  and  is  still  characterized 
by  the  protestant  and  reforming  spirit, 
eclectic  rather  than  evolutionary  and 
inclined  to  imitate  practices  that 
95 


STANDARDS 

contradict  rather  than  modify  the 
standards  it  now  abjures.  So  that  with 
the  best  disposition  in  the  world  we 
are  still  in  the  awkward  age  in  our 
pursuit  of  the  Epicurean  ideal.  The 
first  thing  the  hero  of  "Locksley  Hall," 
it  will  be  remembered,  proposed  to 
do  after  he  had  "burst  all  links  of 
habit"  was  not  to  rise  on  stepping- 
stones  of  his  dead  self  to  higher  things, 
but  to  wed  some  savage  woman  and 
to  procreate  an  inferior  race.  Being 
the  heir  of  all  the  ages,  however,  he 
soon  perceived  that  his  dreams  were 
wild  —  or,  as  we  say  now  in  our  pro- 
gressive dialect,  "it  can't  be  done" 
and  even  came  to  count  the  gray  bar- 
barian lower  than  the  Christian  child. 
In  a  time  when  the  heritage  of  the 
ages  is  regarded  as  a  handicap  and  the 
barbarian  though  gray  ranks  higher 
than  even  the  child  if  a  Christian,  we 
are  inevitably  thrown  back  on  the 
96 


THE  INNER   LIFE 

natural  man,  whose  propensities  may 
be  described  as  stable  though  stand- 
ardless.  What  he  is  likely  to  do  with 
them  can  be  gathered  from  what  hap- 
pens anywhere  when  —  in  our  graphic 
modern  phrase  again  —  the  lid  is  taken 
off  the  social  caldron.  It  can  also  be 
inferred  from  current  social  sentiment 
of  one  sort  or  another,  such  as  the 
instinctive  preference  for  the  criminal 
to  the  police,  which  sees  a  Jean  Val- 
jean  in  every  thief,  and  an  implacable 
Javert  in  every  constable  and  which, 
if  not  yet  thoroughly  popular,  is  def- 
initely professed  by  the  more  thor- 
oughgoing exponents  of  the  new  free- 
dom—  not  to  speak  of  irregularities 
with  which,  as  I  have  suggested,  the 
individual  man  sometimes  recoups  him- 
self for  the  "service"  he  is  so  ardently 
eager  to  render  to  mankind. 

For  all  to  whom  it  is  a  novelty,  in 
fact,  the  life  of  the  senses  has  its  dis- 
97 


STANDARDS 

advantages.  The  first  requisite  for 
leading  it  is,  of  course,  independence 
-the  independence  which  is  the  first 
thing  that  the  inner  life  recognizes 
as  out  of  reach  on  any  terms  it  is 
willing  to  accord.  But  independence 
is  not  the  only  requisite  for  leading  it 
successfully.  "It  is  when  a  man  can 
do  as  he  pleases,"  says  Huxley,  "that 
his  troubles  begin."  They  are  not  like- 
ly to  be  simplified  if  he  takes  the  view 
of  his  independence  that  the  newly 
liberated  prisoner  does,  and  rejoices 
in  it  as  an  end  in  itself.  His  taste 
is  apt  to  suffer  from  the  crudity  in- 
herent in  experimentation.  His  atti- 
tude toward  his  fellows  still  in  the 
bonds  of  conformity,  alternating  as 
it  does  between  compassion  and  con- 
tempt, makes  him  quite  unaware  of 
how  unattractive  the  bravado  that 
attracts  him  seems  to  the  unemanci- 
pated.  Speaking  strictly,  the  cow- 
98 


THE   INNER   LIFE 

boy  "shooting  up"  civilization  is  hardly 
an  exaggerated  analogue  of  the  figure 
presented,  at  least  to  the  conservative 
mind,  by  some  of  the  activities  asso- 
ciated with  the  assertion  of  personal 
independence.  To  the  conservative, 
that  is  to  say,  the  experienced,  mind, 
it  seems  for  instance  naive  to  suppose 
that  what  is  now  so  freely  talked  of 
as  the  single  sexual  standard  will  ulti- 
mately prove  to  be  gold  rather  than 
silver.  Meantime  passing  at  parity, 
as  economists  warn  us,  the  cheaper 
medium  has  the  better  chance.  The 
life  of  the  senses  among  us,  in  a  word, 
will  need  to  acquire  standards  in  some 
degree  constraining  the  desultory  but 
constant  impulses  of  the  natural  man 
before  it  can  establish  itself  as  a  satis- 
factory substitute  for  the  disciplines 
it  aims  at  replacing.  The  self  and  the 
soul  may  be  merely  two  conceptions  of 
the  same  thing,  but  the  one  which  is 
99 


STANDARDS 

mainly  kept  in  mind  distinguishes 
much  conduct  from  that  derived  from 
dwelling  on  the  other. 

The  pride  that  Meredith  notes  as 
distinctively  Pagan  resembles  as  little 
the  modern  egotistic  egoism  that  he 
flayed  as  it  did  the  Christian  humility 
that  succeeded  it  as  an  ideal.  And 
one  of  the  two  is  essential  to  the  inner 
life.  Either  will  do;  but  without  the 
pride  whose  self-respect  scorns  ego- 
tism or  the  humility  whose  spiritual 
refinement  shrinks  from  it,  the  inner 
life  is  a  desert./ And  the  vitality  of  the 
present  time  seems  independent  of 
both.  I  have  been  assuming  all  along, 
I  find,  that  abstractly  at  least  the 
value  of  the  inner  life  is  axiomatically 
apparent  to  every  thoughtful  intelli- 
gence —  however  little  it  may  conduce 
to  the  grosser  forms  of  "service." 
Intelligence  has  never  been  more  wide- 
spread nor  more  thoughtful.  And  one 
100 


THE  INNER  LIFE  ;> 

would  expect  it  to  associate  the  inner 
life  with  that  ideal  of  personality 
which  it  entertains,  even  though  appar- 
ently unaware  of  its  failure  as  mere 
individuality  to  attain  it.  But  really 
when  one  considers  the  aggressive  self- 
assertion,  the  love  of  publicity,  the 
feeling  for  instance  that  the  truth 
should  be  spoken  at  all  times  even  in 
advance  of  determining  what  it  is, 
the  frank  and  loyal  exposure  of  one's 
whole  personal  bag  of  tricks  —  to  take 
the  most  practical  view  of  the  proceed- 
ing —  that  at  present  flourish  as  vir- 
tues, one  can  hardly  fail  to  perceive 
that  the  current  ideal  of  personality 
is  as  defective  as  its  realization  is 
illusory. 

Nothing,  for  example,  is  more  char- 
acteristic of  the  inner  life  than  the 
sentiment  of  awe,  which  has  prac- 
tically disappeared  in  the  "clear-eyed 
and  fearless  "  view  of  the  universe  that 
101 


STANDARDS 

is  now  quite  generally  taken.  The 
starry  heavens  and  the  moral  law  no 
longer  arouse  the  feeling  they  did  in  the 
breast  of  Kant.  The  imagination  is  no 
longer  nourished  by  reflection  on  what 
speculation  has  vainly  tried  to  solve. 
Only  the  sensible  fragment  of  the  vast 
pattern  of  the  universal  scheme  oc- 
cupies the  mind  of  a  time  intensely 
preoccupied  by  what  it  perceives. 
Outside  the  range  of  its  perceptions 
it  disports  itself  in  all  the  relaxation 
of  irresponsibility.  Hence  its  deifica- 
tion of  Poe  and  Whitman  —  the  in- 
congruous constellation  it  has  set  in 
the  firmament  of  our  letters  as  the  Cas- 
tor and  Pollux  of  a  heaven  else  a  milky 
way  of  negligible  nebulae.  "  My  whole 
nature,"  said  Poe,  "utterly  revolts 
at  the  idea  that  there  is  any  being  in 
the  Universe  superior  to  myself."  And 
we  know  who  it  was  that  good  old 
Walt  celebrated,  even  when  he  doesn't 

102 


THE  INNER   LIFE 

candidly  say  so  but  extends  his  theme 
without  essentially  varying  it  to  in- 
clude his  fellow  men  merely  as  his 
fellow  men.  Since  egotism,  thus,  is 
the  sole  nexus  between  such  other- 
wise temperamentally  opposite  types 
as  the  fastidious  and  the  swaggering 
artist,  it  is  probably  what  endears 
them  both  to  a  generation  to  which 
egotism  is  so  congenial  and  awe  so 
antipathetic  as  to  lead  it  to  exteriorize 
even  its  sentiments  into  sensations. 

In  this  process  ethics  as  well  as 
the  personal  morality  to  which  I  have 
referred  suffers  modification.  Even  if 
it  may  be  looked  at  as  the  science  of 
getting  the  most  out  of  life  there  are 
distinctions  between  means  to  the 
end  in  view.  The  sensuous  ideal  of 
repletion  is  perhaps  easiest  to  realize, 
though  the  effort  to  leave  one's  life 
a  sucked  orange  at  its  close  is  doubtless 
more  or  less  exhausting.  "Well,"  ob- 
103 


STANDARDS 

served  an  American  of  genius  on  his 
death-bed  some  years  ago,  "I  can  say 
this:  I've  never  denied  myself  any- 
thing." "What  you  mean  is,"  com- 
fortingly replied  a  candid  compatriot 
of  equal  but  more  analytic  genius, 
"that  what  you've  had,  you've  had  in 
excess."  A  bystander,  without  genius 
but  merely  better  acquainted  with  the 
standards  imposed  by  the  inner  life, 
might  have  reflected  that  the  busi- 
ness of  getting  through  life  creditably, 
though  involving  far  more  effort,  reaps 
pan  passu  far  more  reward  than  the 
success  either  claimed  by  the  one  or 
suggested  by  the  other  of  these  Epicu- 
reans, beside  whom,  too,  those  of  the 
present  day  would  seem  amateurs  in 
hedonism. 

Morality,  however,  is  in  greater  or 

less  degree  a  matter  of  the  mores  from 

which  it  derives,  and,  as  Schiller,  who 

did  not  foresee  our  eager  and  experi- 

104 


THE  INNER   LIFE 

mental  age,  says  of  mankind  in  general, 
"custom  is  its  nurse."  The  springs 
of  the  present  moment,  which  exteri- 
orizes everything,  are  to  be  found  more 
certainly  in  its  attitude  to  the  more 
fundamental  matter  of  religion.  The 
churches  are  no  doubt  fully  alive  to 
what  confronts  them  in  the  militant 
and  anarchic  atheism  that  considers 
their  agencies  —  of  which  it  is  grossly 
ignorant  and  which  probably  continue 
to  administer  the  bulk  of  the  world's 
beneficence  -  -  as  outworn  as  their 
formal  confessions.  A  theologically  de- 
tached observer  should  perhaps  con- 
fine himself  to  remarking  that  in  any 
case  they  appear  to  have  their  work 
cut  out  for  them.  But  remembering 
Arnold's  characterization  of  religion 
as  the  most  lovable  of  things,  one 
can  but  reflect  that  it  would  be  salu- 
tary to  treat  this  attractive  quality 
of  lovableness  a  little  less  summarily 
105 


STANDARDS 

than  is  sometimes  done,  and  insist  a 
little  more  pointedly  on  the  truth  that 
"service"  is  not  a  complete  substitute 
for  religion.  Both  Deuteronomy  and 
the  Gospel,  dividing  love  into  love  of 
God  and  love  of  one's  neighbor,  assign 
the  primacy  to  the  former --in  their 
own  view  we  may  be  sure  not  conven- 
tionally but  experientially.  The  re- 
versal of  this  relation  has  very  definite 
results,  as  we  see  in  the  case  of  France. 
France  is  such  a  splendid  figure  at  the 
present  time  that  the  enthusiasm  for 
her  has  reached  the  degree  of  engoue- 
ment  —  an  engouement  that  delights 
the  soul  of  her  earlier  friends.  Every- 
body can  see  it  now.  What  she  is 
and  what  she  stands  for  shine  over  an 
area  as  wide  as  the  world.  At  the 
same  time  one  too  long  familiar  with 
her  conduct  in  crises  to  be  surprised 
by  her  bearing  now,  may  be  per- 
mitted to  recall  his  impression  long 
106 


THE  INNER   LIFE 

ago  recorded  of  routine  France  - 
namely,  that  to  her  reversal  of  the 
order  of  the  two  commandments  on 
which  hang  all  the  law  and  the  proph- 
ets, itself  due  to  the  high  develop- 
ment of  her  social  instinct,  is  due  her 
ideal  of  social  rather  than  personal 
morality,  and  the  predominance  in 
its  following  of  the  mind  and  heart 
over  the  soul.  To  this,  nevertheless, 
the  history  of  the  "eldest  daughter  of 
the  Church"  presents  a  host  of  shin- 
ing exceptions,  and  plainly  to  the 
religion  that  has  been  so  strong  a 
formative  influence  even  of  Voltairian 
France,  to  Catholicism  with  its  sense 
of  social  unity,  is  largely  to  be  ascribed 
the  even  step  which  in  France  the 
heart  has  kept  with  the  mind. 

Our  history  is  too  different  to  jus- 
tify  the    current    disposition   to   take 
over    her    ideals    en    bloc  —  including 
her  emancipation  from  the  despotism 
107 


STANDARDS 

of  the  individual  conscience,  which 
certainly  has  its  drawbacks,  and  her 
development  of  the  life  of  the  senses, 
out  of  which,  as  I  have  intimated,  she 
has  long  made  a  very  different  thing 
from  that  which  has  thus  far  rewarded 
our  own  efforts  in  this  direction.  Our 
ideality  in  the  field  of  the  conscience 
is  now  experiencing  the  modification 
natural  to  expect  of  an  individualism 
so  ingrained  as  to  tinge  even  our 
socialism  with  the  color  of  anarchy. 
Long  accustomed  to  hear  that  the 
kingdom  of  heaven  is  within  one,  it 
is  not  unnatural  that  the  decline  of 
formal  religion  among  us  and  the 
invasion  of  the  inner  life  by  egotism 
should  accord  with  a  feeling  that  there, 
also,  are  to  be  found  "whatever  gods 
there  be,"  in  the  words  made  less  pop- 
ular by  Swinburne  than  by  Henley's 
paean  —  unlike  Wordsworth's  Nun, 
sonorous  in  self-adoration.  The  idea 
108 


THE  INNER   LIFE 

is  an  advance  on  Comte's  doctrine  of 
Humanity,  though  worked  out  with 
considerably  less  thoroughness.  And 
conceiving  of  God  as  simply  some  ideal 
of  our  own,  the  human  mind  being 
assumed  to  be  the  highest  creative 
agency  known  in  nature,  is  a  shorter 
and  easier  way  of  dealing  with  the 
subject  than  Joubert's  method  of  know- 
ing God  by  ceasing  to  try  to  define 
Him.  /It  makes  a  great  difference 
practically,  however,  in  the  life  of 
society  as  well  as  in  the  life  of  the 
individual  whether  God  is  conceived 
as  the  "Eternal  Not  Ourselves"  or  as 
the  "Eternal  Ourselves."  In  the  lat- 
ter case,  even  in  an  age  of  egotism,  it  is 
easy  for  any  one  with  a  gift  of  intro- 
spection to  see  how  in  strict  logic  he 
may  now  and  then  become  the  very 
devil --in  the  letters  and  art,  for 
example,  which  reflect  the  individual 
and  communal  life  aforesaid.  The  in- 
109 


STANDARDS 

ner  life  must  at  any  rate  be  less  and 
less  effectively  celebrated  by  letters 
and  art  in  the  degree  of  its  consecra- 
tion to  the  "Eternal  Ourselves"  within 
us,  and  perhaps  its  disappearance  alto- 
gether would  be  involved  in  the  sur- 
vival of  the  sense  of  humor.  / 


no 


VI 

"MODERN  ART" 

NO  general  feature  of  the  time, 
perhaps,  more  markedly  illus- 
trates the  main  characteristics  hitherto 
noted  than  the  latest  phase  of  modern 
art,  the  representative  character  of 
which  accordingly  has  an  interest  in- 
dependent of  its  intrinsic  claims.  It 
has  in  these  latest  days  so  monopolized 
the  more  comprehensive  title  that 
when  "modern  art"  is  referred  to  it 
is  generally  understood  that  its  latest 
phase  is  meant.  The  "evolution"  of 
painting  since  Monet,  for  example, 
sculpture  since  Rodin,  the  art  that 
seems  to  the  uninitiate  extravagance 
and  eccentricity -- art  sans  taste,  in 
fact,  and,  what  is  still  more  strik- 
ing, sans  virtuosity.  This  art  leans 
in 


STANDARDS 

rather  heavily  on  metaphysics,  which 
at  last  seems  to  have  invaded  the  pro- 
fessional art  arcanum  —  as  to  which 
one  may  feel  less  chagrin  than  sur- 
prise that  it  had  not  done  so  before. 
It  is  in  consequence  extremely  theoretic 
and  in  theory  lays  great  stress  on  per- 
sonality. But,  though  it  is  plainly 
tremendously  individual,  owing  to  the 
confusion  I  have  already  spoken  of, 
whereby  individuality  is  mistaken  for 
this  very  different  quality,  it  is  led 
into  the  error  of  justifying  its  extrav- 
agances by  its  sincerity -- regarding 
them,  that  is  to  say,  as  personal  ex- 
pression instead  of  wilful  eccentricity. 
How  otherwise  than  by  this  confusion 
account  for  its  combination  of  sincerity 
and  an  extravagance  so  extreme  as  to 
appear  mystification  ?  Given  its  sin- 
cerity why  is  it  that  so  many  concrete 
examples  of  theoretic  personality  are 
so  destitute  of  the  distinction  that, 

112 


"MODERN   ART' 

precisely,  is  the  sign  manual  of  per- 
sonality and  are  instead,  as  Henry 
James  might  say,  so  damnably  com- 
monplace ?  For  I  take  it  nothing  is  !  l/ 
more  commonplace  than  extravagance 
without  distinction.  If  in  a  word 
you  are  absolutely  sincere  and  what 
you  show  —  to  anything  but  the  mi- 
croscope —  is  some  manifestation  of 
"group  consciousness"  rather  than  an 
idiosyncratic  expression,  you  are  prob- 
ably mistaken  about  your  personality 
—  at  least  in  the  higher  reaches  where 
it  becomes  perceptible  to  others.  One 
understands  what  Mr.  Dougherty 
means  by  "academic."  Extravagance 
has  no  standards,  of  course,  as  both 
terms  of  the  word  itself  recognize. 
But  sincerity,  being  a  positive  quality, 
has.  And  to  deny  sincerity  to  the 
modern  movement  is  to  evince  a  dis- 
position which  in  itself  tends  to  ex- 
plain it  as  a  movement  and  which 
113 


STANDARDS 

illustrates  the  trades-union  spirit  in- 
stinctive in  all  fields,  not  only  of  art 
and  letters  but  of  life,  wherein  men 
have  reached  the  formulae  of  their  me- 
tier only  after  a  prolonged  and  often 
painful  apprenticeship.  Mr.  Clive 
Bell,  portions  of  whose  book  entitled 
"Art"  might  give  a  salutary  jolt  to 
some  of  our  conservatives,  draws  a 
touching  picture  of  young  painters  he 
has  seen  in  Paris  "penniless,  half-fed, 
unwarmed,  ill-clothed,  their  women  and 
children  in  no  better  case,  working  all 
day  in  feverish  ecstasy  at  unsalable 
pictures."  One  feels  that  they  were 
young,  and  learns  with  more  surprise 
that  "they  were  superbly  religious." 
"Superbly  religious"  is,  as  we  now  say, 
"a  new  one."  But  we  must  be  on  our 
guard  against  Mr.  Clive  Bell,  who  adds 
succinctly,  "All  artists  are  religious," 
and  who  is  so  far  from  conceiving  re- 
ligion as  "morality  touched  with  emo- 
114 


"MODERN  ART' 

tion"  as  apparently  to  believe  it  emo- 
tion untouched  with  morality,  or  with 
anything  indeed  save  the  desire  to 
manifest  itself.  However,  we  may  cer- 
tainly credit  his  testimony  to  the  sin- 
cerity of  his  young  friends.  No  doubt 
the  movement  has  its  share  of  charla- 
tanism. Nothing  so  theoretic  as  to 
sophisticate  its  practice  can  avoid  do- 
ing so.  Besides  as  Napoleon  observed: 
"Where  will  you  not  find  charlatan- 
ism?" 

But  it  is  fatuous  to  diagnose  as 
charlatanism  what  irritates  you  be- 
cause you  have  first  irritated  it,  and 
what  excites  such  wide-spread  enthusi- 
asm. To  see  in  it  on  the  other  hand 
a  spirit  too  protestant  in  its  origin  to 
promise  positiveness  in  its  develop- 
ment, and  under  illusions  as  to  the 
constructiveness  of  its  character,  is  to 
take  a  more  rational  as  well  as  more  re- 
ceptive attitude  —  is,  in  effect,  merely 


STANDARDS 

to  confess  an  inability  to  see  it  other- 
wise and  endeavor  to  explain  the  rea- 
sons for  one's  incapacity.  One  may, 
however,  remember  the  tendency  of 
fanaticism,  which  by  definition  has 
sincerity  to  spare,  to  accrete  a  fringes 
of  imposture,  and  perceive  in  the 
mysticism  associated  with  the  new 
movement  at  least  a  mild  menace  of 
the  mystification  to  which  the  esoteric 
is  always  exposed,  and  from  which  it 
is  only  to  be  saved  by  the  interposition 
now  and  then  of  exoteric  standards. 
My  only  point  is  that  the  new  art, 
however  provided  with  ideas,  has  not 
yet  standardized  them  sufficiently  to 
make  them  appear  to  others  as  other 
than  notions,  that  it  is  held  back  from 
doing  so  by  its  hostility  to  standards  in 
themselves  in  its  pursuit  of  freedom, 
and  that  it  would  be  a  good  thing  all 
around  if  it  should  get  some  standards 
of  its  own,  instead  of  "thrilling"  the 
116 


"MODERN   ART' 

observer  by  flouting  the  conventional. 
It  could  do  this  without  subscribing 
to  Mr.  Cox's  dictum  that  there  is  no 
progress  in  art,  which  to  any  one  who  \ 
conceives  art  as  an  expression  of  life 
can  only  be  true  if  there  is  no  progress 
in  life  —  a  tenable  hypothesis  surely 
but  perhaps  not  widely  enough  held 
to  repay  argument.  It  would,  at  all 
events,  in  this  way  further  what  it 
conceives  to  be  progress  by  minimizing 
the  retarding  friction  of  reaction  which 
so  inveterately  dogs  the  steps  of  extrav- 
agance. A  young  American  painter 
in  Paris  ardently  enamored  of  the 
new  movement  remarked  to  me  that 
only  about  three  per  cent  of  it  was 
sound  but  that  this  was  enough  to 
justify  it.  Still,  remembering  how 
much  mass  counts  in  matters  of  this 
kind  one  may  say  that  his  percentage 
will  have  to  be  increased  if  the  move- 
ment is  not  to  exemplify  anew  the 
117 


STANDARDS 

eternal  seesaw  between  what  is  called 
"going  too  far"  and  not  going  at  all. 
There  has  been,  we  must  admit,  a 
good  deal  of  the  latter,  and  since  it 
seems  to  be  the  former's  turn,  it  is 
perhaps  less  quixotic  to  hope  its  pres- 
ent irresponsible  individualism  will 
not  continue  to  leave  progress  wholly 
to  chance,  than  to  expect  any  dis- 
turbance of  the  stasis  of  routine  prac- 
tice that  has  conventionalized  the 
vitality  out  of  its  own  standards. 

Meantime  in  spite  of  its  theory  it  is 
a  condition  with  which  the  latest  art 
confronts  us.  What  it  says  of  itself 
impresses  us  less  than  how  it  looks. 
Its  positive  side  is  as  yet  so  dominated 
by  its  polemic  spirit  as  to  make  it 
doubtful  if  it  be  not  after  all  less  a 
stage  than  a  "sport"  in  art  evolution. 
Its  advocates  assert  its  analogy  with 
the  men  of  1830.  The  fundamental 
contrast  appears  in  a  single  example. 
118 


"MODERN  ART'3 

Delacroix  spent  years  copying  in  the 
Louvre.  Some  of  the  energumens  of 
the  present  wish  to  burn  the  museums. 
All  convinced  modernists  maintain 
that,  splendid  as  is  the  drawing  of 
some  of  the  old  masters,  beautiful  as 
is  the  rendering  of  Velasquez  and  so 
on,  art  is  still  in  its  infancy  because 
its  potentialities  have  just  begun  to  be 
perceived.  A  familiar  illustration  cited 
by  them  is  that  of  the  aeroplane,  which 
betrays  precisely  the  confusion  of  art 
with  science  that  formally  they  deplore. 
And  in  effect  the  contribution  to  the 
development  of  art  of  the  movement 
preceding  their  own  must  be  viewed, 
although  certainly  not  belittled,  as 
mainly  a  technical  contribution.  No 
one  can  fail  to  acknowledge  the  tech- 
nical change  that  owing  to  an  influ- 
ence beginning  with  Manet  and  Monet 
has  keyed  up  current  exhibitions  every- 
where, including  the  most  academic  of 
119 


STANDARDS 

our  own.  In  consequence  of  it  what 
first  strikes  one  now  in  current  ex- 
hibitions is  the  subordination  of  sub- 
stance to  surface.  The  substitution  of 
absolute  for  relative  values  by  Manet, 
the  addition  of  sunlight  unenforced 
by  shadow  together  with  the  use  of 
broken  color  by  Monet,  comprise  a 
contribution  constituting  an  authentic 
and  standardized  advance.  The  art- 
ist has  certainly  developed  a  new 
expertness  in  seeing  things  in  color 
and  in  seeing  color  in  things,  coin- 
cidently  with  the  discovery  that  more 
vibrant  and  brilliant  solidity  could  be 
achieved  by  combining  the  elements  of 
the  spectrum  in  the  eye  rather  than  on 
the  palette.  At  a  certain  distance  in 
this  way  an  effect  could  be  obtained 
surpassing  in  pure  quality  any  effect 
attainable  by  blended  unification  at 
any  distance  however  slight.  Paint- 
ing bound  into  its  own  handbook  a 

120 


"MODERN   ART" 

leaf  from  the  practice  of  the  master 
mosaicists  and  gleams  from  Ravenna 
glowed  anew  on  modern  canvases. 

Thereupon  ensued  the  epoch  of  ex- 
aggeration and  fantasticality.  Seeing 
mainly  the  novelty  in  the  work  of  its 
immediate  predecessors,  and  appar- 
ently not  recognizing  in  their  color 
discovery  essentially  an  adaptation  of 
an  old  principle  inevitable  in  an  old 
practice,  it  set  about  the  business  of 
being  novel  itself  by  main  strength. 
In  the  way  of  exaggeration  we  have 
for  example  the  sacrifice  to  carrying 
power  of  what  used  to  be  called  the 
"handsome  canvas"  -a  sacrifice  that 
can  be  minimized  only  if  the  easel 
picture  is  to  go,  which  is  a  practical 
absurdity.  Meanwhile  what  is  gained 
if  the  illusion  of  relief  and  the  effect 
of  brilliancy  are  heightened  by  the 
blending  of  distance  so  that  a  canvas 
only  shows  at  thirty  feet  a  quality  it 

121 


STANDARDS 

loses  at  ten,  besides  losing  also  every- 
thing that  constitutes  it  a  "handsome 
canvas "?  And  except  in  an  exhibition 
it  is  at  ten  that  it  is  seen.  Of  course 
it  is  interesting  to  see  it  gain  in  "vi- 
tality" as  one  moves  away  from  it. 
But  this  interest  is  a  scientific  and  not 
an  aesthetic  one.  Nor  is  vitality  every- 
thing. There  are  some  things  that 
demand  a  delicacy  of  technic  incon- 
sistent with  it. 

"Light  feet,  dark  violet  eyes  and  parted  hair, 
Soft  dimpled  hands,  white  neck  and  creamy 
breast" 

deserve  to  be  seen  near  to,  where  alone 
their  delicacy  can  be  appreciated  and 
where  accordingly  they  should  not 
appear  under  the  aspect  of 

Lead  feet,  bold,  blue-black  eyes  and  violet  hair, 
Hard  knotty  hands,  green  neck  and  chalky 
breast, 

however  they  may  regain  their  mere 
identity  and  even  acquire  an  added 

122 


"MODERN  ART' 

vitality  at  a  distance.  The  note  of 
vitality  is  capable  of  being  forced,  and 
when  it  is  forced  systematically  the 
sense  of  beauty  in  both  artist  and 
beholder  must  suffer  some  attrition 
in  the  long  run.  Certain  elements  of 
this  sense,  such  as  its  feeling  for  the 
exquisite  and  the  elegant,  are  already 
extinct  in  "modern  art,"  in  none  of 
whose  manifestations  is  there  any  trace 
of  the  quality  that  makes  a  master- 
piece of  every  canvas  of  a  painter  like, 
for  example,  Charles  Bargue.  And  in- 
deed the  convinced  modernist  is  quite 
logical  in  conceiving  beauty  as  once 
conceived  not  his  affair  at  all.  Other- 
wise his  canvases  would  at  his  chosen 
distance  evince  a  different  kind  of 
elementary  taste  from  that  which  they 
sometimes  exhibit  —  mass,  for  example, 
look  less  messy  and  detail  have  more 
distinction.  The  vitality  of  an  en- 
semble of  properties  without  any  par- 
123 


STANDARDS 

ticular  quality,  to  which  he  so  often 
treats  us  must  be  of  a  more  or  less 
galvanic  order. 

In  the  way  of  fantasticality  we  have 
also  technical  experimentation  in  search 
of  novelty  a  outrance  —  post-impres- 
sionism, futurism,  cubism.  But  here 
the  standardless  emotionalism  of  the 
time  is  more  universal,  more  funda- 
mental, and  more  evident  than  in  its 
mere  exaggeration,  and  here  we  enter 
the  penetralia  of  a  metaphysical  cul- 
tus  which  ascribes  an  esoteric  quality 
to  the  artist  as  such.  Here  when  he 
comes  to  exteriorize  the  emotion  his 
possession  of,  or  rather  by,  which  is 
plainly  not  illusory  since  it  is  so  ob- 
viously in  large  part  his  explanation, 
his  logic  is  less  conspicuous  than  it 
is  when  he  is  engaged  in  sacrificing 
insipid  beauty  to  the  Moloch  of  vital- 
ity. For  instance,  Mr.  Clive  Bell, 
again,  asserts  quite  truly  that  "a  prac- 
124 


"MODERN  ART" 

tical  person  goes  into  a  room  where 
there  are  chairs,  tables,  sofas,  a  hearth- 
rug, and  a  mantelpiece  and  takes  note 
of  each  of  these  things  intellectually/' 
whereas  "the  artist  qua  artist"  is 
concerned  with  them  "only  as  a  means 
to  a  particular  kind  of  emotion." 
Why,  then,  has  Vermeer  ceased  to 
thrill  the  "modern"  ?  Because,  appar- 
ently, he  expresses  his  emotion  by  the 
representation  that  will  communicate 
it.  At  least  Mr.  Clive  Bell  continues 
a  little  later  that  "manifestation  is  as 
different  from  ' expression'  as  Mon- 
mouth  is  from  Macedon."  The  dis- 
tinction confirms  our  worst  suspicions 
as  to  much  of  the  concrete  art  which 
Mr.  Clive  Bell  celebrates,  and  of  which 
many  of  the  manifestations  seem  so 
manifestly  expressionless.  The  theory 
is  a  labor-saving  one  but  not  otherwise 
attractive,  because  even  expression  in 
art  needs  to  be  supplemented  by  com- 
125 


STANDARDS 

munication  if  it  is  to  be  appreciated 
at  all.  "Every  expressor  is  related 
solely  to  himself"  announces  one  of 
the  exhibitors  in  the  catalogue  derai- 
sonne  of  a  recent  modern  show.  As 
to  which  the  observer  may  reflect 
with  Mr.  Santayana  that  "solipsism 
in  another  is  absurd."  The  artist 
cannot  be  permitted  to  function  for 
himself  alone.  Such  selfishness  would 
in  ordinary  eyes  compromise  even  his 
religious  character.  And  if  he  is  to 
be  appreciated  he  must  communicate. 
Otherwise  his  emotional  manifestation 
must  mystify  us.  If  he  has  not,  in 
popular  parlance,  "got  it  over,"  how 
do  we  know  he  has  got  it  out  ?  He 
has  perhaps  had  his  catharsis,  but  in 
secret.  Besides  we  want  ours.  Ours, 
indeed,  was  the  one  Aristotle  had  in 
mind. 

At  bottom  this  explains  the  puzzled 
resentment  of  the  beholder,  who  qua 
126 


"MODERN   ART' 

beholder  is  not  religious  in  any  sense. 
He  feels  cheated  of  his  dues,  and 
manifests  emotion  too,  though  emo- 
tion of  the  expressionable  kind, 
clearly  his  only  way  of  getting  even 
with  the  artist.  And  how  is  the  artist 
to  communicate  save  through  appear- 
ances? We  know  of  course  that  the 
form  of  an  egg  is  not  really  its  shell, 
but  the  modern  artist  had  better  for- 
get metaphysics  and  think  it  is  if  we 
are  to  share  the  emotion  its  "pure 
form"  produces  in  him.  Speculation 
aside  —  since  it  is  already  in  shreds  - 
what  one  practically  notes  in  much 
"modern  art/'  objectively  considered, 
is  that  representation  instead  of  being 
artistic  rather  than  literal  is  approxi- 
mate rather  than  close,  attesting  in- 
capacity to  render  rather  than  ability 
to  generalize.  The  same  glance  re- 
veals the  target  and  records  the  miss. 
Subjectively  we  must  take  the  artist's 
127 


STANDARDS 

word  for  his  success.  We  need  his 
own  private  sources  of  information  to 
see  in  his  treatment  of  his  theme  the 
expression  or  manifestation  of  his  per- 
sonality—  to  recur  to  the  illusion  of 
personality  with  which  he  clothes  his 
sense  of  himself  as  an  individual.  We 
can  only  see  that  what  he  maintains 
he  has  first  analyzed  and  then  alem- 
bicated, and  that  what  he  seeks  be- 
cause it  is  elusive  and  abstract,  has 
proved  elusive  and  is  certainly  not 
concrete.  What  he  has  failed  to  keep 
out  is  as  little  personal  as  what  he 
has  succeeded  in  putting  in.  He  may 
be  an  altogether  different  kind  of 
man  from  what  we  should  naturally 
expect,  and  we  ought  perhaps  to  be 
more  careful  than  we  sometimes  are 
to  avoid  doing  him  the  injustice  he 
is  at  no  pains  to  forefend.  He  may, 
so  far  as  we  can  see,  have  a  sensitive 
soul  and  an  intelligent  mind  enriched 
128 


"MODERN  ART' 

with  experience  and  even  erudition. 
But  it  is  idle  to  fancy  we  could  infer 
anything  so  concrete  from  an  algebraic 
alembication  of  the  elusive  and  the 
abstract,  in  the  absence  of  standards 
with  which  he  has  not  only  not  fur- 
nished us  but  to  the  mere  notion  of 
which  he  is  inveterately  opposed. 

At  all  events  his  sincerity  has  not 
been  able  to  protect  him  against  mis- 
taking self-assertion  for  independence 
and  it  is  easy  to  see  in  many  of  his 
"  manifestations "  the  aggressiveness 
characteristic  of  attenuated  personal- 
ity. The  chief  figures  in  this  distinctly 
notional  movement  have  certainly 
characters  as  clearly  concentrated  as 
they  are  obviously  limited.  But  in  the 
work  of  the  mass  of  their  followers 
derivation  is  the  first  —  and  last  - 
thing  noticeable,  when  indeed  the  work 
rises  out  of  a  mere  mechanical  reflec- 
tion of  the  notionality  of  the  movement 
129 


STANDARDS 

considered  as  a  whole.  Never  was  a 
convention  so  quickly  established  as 
this  convention  of  the  unconventional. 
Never,  for  this  reason,  has  a  major 
convention  been  so  quickly  productive 
of  a  multitude  of  minor  ones  wherein 
the  personal  force  of  independence 
has  been  so  speedily  paralyzed  by  the 
poison  of  irresponsibility.  The  per- 
sonal force  moreover  that  operates  at 
ease  on  the  plane  and  in  the  region 
delimited  by  standards  insensibly  es- 
tablished, must  naturally  be  constrict- 
ed and  enfeebled  when  driven  into  the 
enclosure  of  a  movement  largely  tech- 
nical and  chiefly  characterized  by 
exaggeration  and  fantasticality.  The 
work  of  the  real  personalities  of  current 
art,  those  who  feel  a  new  sentiment 
in  nature,  such  as  that  of  the  particu- 
lar place,  those  who  feel  new  aspects 
of  nature,  as  those  disclosed  by  more 
attentive  consideration  of  light  and 
130 


"MODERN  ART" 

color,  those  in  other  words  whose  work 
is  the  interpretation  of  new  discoveries 
in  their  inexhaustible  material,  who, 
as  Carriere  declared,  "love  discovery 
and  detest  invention,"  inevitably  sub- 
scribe to  recognized  standards  in  qual- 
ity of  aim  and  effort.  And  in  doing 
so  they  undoubtedly  contrast  rather 
than  accord  with  the  great  mass  of 
a  movement  whose  technical  experi- 
mentation is  no  more  to  be  explained 
than  it  is  to  be  justified  by  employing 
the  terms  of  metaphysical  notionality 
to  characterize  the  work  of  a  rather 
hastily  assumed  artistic  temperament. 
Pictures  for  the  blind,  music  for  the 
deaf,  if  they  have  the  intellectual 
interest  claimed  for  them,  have  it  in 
virtue  of  a  scientific  rather  than  an 
artistic  appeal,  and  naturally  there- 
fore escape  slavery  to  such  standards 
as  are  here  in  question.  And  of  course 
science  negates  personality.  The  curi- 
131 


STANDARDS 

osity  stimulated  and  satisfied  by  the 
average  collection  of  "modern  art" 
may  be  a  far  livelier  feeling  than  that 
aroused  by  an  exhibition  of  academic 
inanities  but  it  is  not  an  artistic  feeling. 
It  is  aroused  by  an  inspection  of  tech- 
nic  rather  than  substance  and  must 
content  itself  with  less  personal  feel- 
ing than  can  be  observed  in  the  most 
conventional  academic  array  whose 
technic,  at  all  events,  has  not  distracted 
the  artist  however  little  it  may  divert 
the  spectator.  Of  course  I  am  not 
speaking  of  beautiful  technic,  which 
has  an  abundant  if  inferior  artistic  in- 
terest, but  of  the  particular  technic 
of  much  "modern  art"  which  is  at 
once  its  characterizing  and,  from  the 
standpoint  of  beauty,  its  most  repel- 
lent feature. 

Beauty    indeed    is   one   of  the   few 
abstractions    it    views    as    necessarily 
conventional,  but  its  theory  here  does 
132 


"MODERN  ART" 

not  save  it  from  the  caricature  in- 
herent in  its  extravagance  of  exaggera- 
tion and  fantasticality.  Caricature  is, 
of  course,  not  simply  queerness.  It  is 
the  exaggeration,  as  art  is  the  empha- 
sis, of  the  essential.  But  what  is  mere 
accent  to  the  temperamentally  crude, 
however  esoterically  expert,  is  exag- 
geration to  the  cultivated.  Obviously, 
therefore,  the  only  path  to  any  con- 
sensus whereby  "modern"  may  suc- 
ceed established  art  as  a  later  phase  of 
orderly  evolution  —  as,  for  example, 
romanticism  did  classicism  and  natu- 
ralism romanticism  —  lies  through  the 
cultivation  of  the  crude.  What  we 
are  now  rather  delightedly  witnessing, 
however,  is  rather  the  contamination 
of  the  cultivated,  exhibited  in  individ- 
ual eccentricities  which  find  even  their 
own  bond  of  union  in  a  common  hos- 
tility to  the  standardizing  influence 
of  taste.  The  fact  that  these  eccen- 


STANDARDS 

tricities  tend  rapidly  through  imita- 
tion to  establish  their  own  several 
conventions  is  to  be  explained  by  con- 
tagion -  -  which  conserves  its  char- 
acter whatever  the  personal  force  of 
the  individuals  it  attacks.  It  loses 
to  be  sure  its  intensity  in  spreading; 
the  tendency  of  the  unconventional 
to  establish  conventions  of  its  own 
is  as  I  said  marked.  Thereupon  it 
is  left  with  those  conventions  on 
its  hands,  conventions  ineffaceably 
stamped  with  the  fundamental  eccen- 
tricity of  their  origin,  however  they 
may  come  to  pass  as  current  coin. 
This  reasoning  is  clearly  less  applica- 
ble to  the  constructive  than  to  the 
purely  revolutionary  element  in  mod- 
ern art.  The  difficulty  is  that  the  con- 
structive element  is  so  largely  a  matter 
of  technic  and  of  technic  so  largely 
unalleviated  by  taste. 


VII 

THE  CAUSE  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 


A^.E  art  and  letters  to  be  senti- 
mentalized out  of  their  estab- 
lished standards  by  the  comprehen- 
sive and  militant  democratic  movement 
of  our  time  ?  is  the  question  in  which 
our  whole  discussion  ends.  Still  more 
succinctly,  are  they  to  be  produced 
by  and  for  the  crude  or  the  cultivated  ? 
Hitherto  -  -  miracles  of  genius  ex- 
cepted,  as  an  incalculable  element  in 
any  discussion  —  they  have  been  pro- 
duced by  special  and  arduous  training, 
for  the  appreciation  of  general  and 
hardly  less  arduously  attained  cul- 
ture —  the  rest  of  the  interested  public 
taking  its  cue  from  these  as  at  least 
useful  guides  and  not,  as  at  present, 


STANDARDS 

instinctively  suspicious  of  them  as 
vitiated  by  professionalism.  The  ex- 
pert it  is  true  in  all  departments  of 
effort  has  his  own  personal  equation 
for  which  it  is  always  prudent  to  make 
due  allowance.  But  the  field  of  art 
and  letters  is  after  all  a  circumscribed 
one  in  the  world  of  mankind's  activities, 
and  its  proper  cultivation  has  reached 
a  pitch  of  intensiveness  that  demands 
more  knowledge  and  training  than  mere 
inkling  and  energy  have  at  their  com- 
mand. The  artist  who  with  Mr.  Clive 
Bell  conceives  art  as  religion  easily 
brings  himself  to  avoid  difficulties  pain- 
ful to  surmount,  and  naturally  deems 
it  a  business  of  the  soul.  Like  the 
water  of  life  in  the  Apocalypse  it  is 
in  his  view  to  be  taken  freely  and  by 
all  comers.  Multitudes  have  certainly 
come,  such  numbers  indeed  as  to  put 
the  principle  of  natural  selection  quite 
out  of  commission  and  make  one  look 
136 


ART  AND  LETTERS 

back  wistfully  to  the  old  disciplined 
novitiate  as  a  preparation  for,  at  least, 
the  priesthood  of  the  cult. 

Paul  Baudry  was  not  a  great  artist 
in  the  sense  of  being  an  artist  of  orig- 
inal genius.  But  consider  his  career 
and  accomplishment  as  an  example 
of  what  intelligent  instead  of  senti- 
mental democracy  can  produce.  Mr. 
Low  sketches  it  for  us  in  his  Scammon 
Lectures.  He  was  the  son  of  a  sabot 
maker  in  a  small  provincial  town.  In- 
stead of  considering  exclusively  its  own 
material  needs  the  commune,  having 
discovered  intimations  of  genuine  tal- 
ent in  him,  taxed  itself  to  send  him  to 
Paris.  Hard  work  won  him  the  prix 
de  Rome.  Years  of  study  at  the  Villa 
Medici,  and  the  culture  he  as  inevi- 
tably as  unconsciously  absorbed  in  the 
Roman  atmosphere  of  elevated  aes- 
thetic achievement,  resulted  in  his  dec- 
oration of  the  Nouvel  Opera,  a  work 


STANDARDS 

which,  whatever  its  faults  or  shortcom- 
ings, simply  pinnacles  him  as  one  of  the 
salient  figures  in  painting  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  The  "expressor  re- 
lated solely  to  himself"  may  justifiably 
interest  us  less.  Supposing  this  per- 
son to  have  condescendingly  entered  so 
banal  a  structure  as  Garnier's  master- 
piece he  may  quite  legitimately,  I 
think,  note  the  weakness  of  Baudry's 
personal  expression,  the  derivative 
character  of  his  beautiful  drawing  and 
skilful  composition,  his  attenuation 
of  the  Raphaelesque  in  his  exclusive 
continuance  of  its  tradition.  But  in 
the  way  of  accomplishment,  of  per- 
petuating the  spirit  of  the  monumental 
and  the  beautiful,  what  is  in  compari- 
son his  own  eager  but  wanton  experi- 
mentation in  an  august  field,  entered 
without  credentials  of  specific  equip- 
ment or  general  culture  ?  The  con- 
trast is  striking  but  is  merely  typical 
138 


ART  AND  LETTERS 

of  that  necessarily  constant  between 
disciplined  and  so-called  free  art. 

But  conceding  the  artist's  possession 
of  his  craft  and  the  pitch  of  clever- 
ness that  our  writers  have  achieved, 
the  weakness  of  those  young  friends  of 
Mr.  Clive  Bell,  the  weakness  in  fact 
of  the  practitioner  in  general  in  the 
field  of  art  and  letters  at  the  present 
time,  is  that  not  as  an  artist  nor  as  a 
writer  but  as  a  man  he  does  not  know 
enough.  The  fact  may  be  noted  with- 
out invidiousness,  since  it  only  places 
him  in  the  same  category  in  which 
Arnold  set  Byron  and  Wordsworth  — 
the  two  figures  in  English  literature 
that  after  Shakespeare  and  Milton 
he  deemed  the  most  majestic.  But 
it  is  not  necessary  to  argue  from  august 
examples  the  value  of  knowledge  to  the 
criticism  of  life  on  a  stately  scale,  in 
order  to  appreciate  the  importance  to 
any  specific  work  of  intelligence  of  its 
139 


STANDARDS 

intellectual  connotation.  It  is  indeed 
of  primary  importance  that  this  too 
should  be  important  in  order  to  secure 
the  importance  of  the  work  itself.  If 
the  work  is  to  appeal  to  any  observer 
or  reader  who  really  counts,  it  must 
stimulate  associations  of  real  value 
and  not  merely  produce  a  reaction  of 
the  senses.  Therefore  the  painter  or 
the  poet  must  himself  have  these 
associations.  Otherwise  how  evoke 
them  in  others  ?  It  is  a  commonplace 
that  no  one  can  know  anything  well 
without  knowing  other  things  too.  In 
point  of  fact  the  first  thing  we  wish  to 
know,  to  feel,  to  see  in  a  work  of  art 
is  just  this:  What  and  how  much 
does  the  mind  of  the  artist  contain  ? 
What  is  its  other  furniture  besides 
merely  the  special  aptitude  and  equip- 
ment required  for  the  production  of 
this  particular  thing,  of  which  this  par- 
ticular thing  is  but  the  sample  ?  It  is 
140 


ART  AND  LETTERS 

not  the  foot  that  interests  us  but 
Hercules.  We  are  brought  around 
finally,  I  think,  to  make  the  same  de- 
mand of  culture  in  the  case  of  the  art- 
ist, which  I  began  by  suggesting  in 
the  case  of  his  public.  To  require 
the  artist  to  know  more  is,  however, 
to  exact  something  quite  out  of  keep- 
ing with  the  spirit  of  the  time. 

For  example,  there  is  Mr.  Eastman's 
delightful  and  notable  book,  "Enjoy- 
ment of  Poetry,"  one  of  the  most  con- 
sidered contributions  that  have  been 
made  to  American  criticism.  Mr. 
Eastman  is  a  poet  himself.  And  more 
even  than  in  poetry  he  is  interested  in 
increasing  the  stock  of  human  happi- 
ness. Naturally  he  thinks  of  poetry  as 
an  ally.  And  a  genuine  and  valuable 
ally  he  makes  it  out  to  be.  It  would 
be  hard  to  find  elsewhere  more  pene- 
trating observations  upon  the  art  of 
poetry,  all  quite  new  as  well  as  evi- 
141 


STANDARDS 

dently  long  pondered  and  fitting  beau- 
tifully together  in  demonstration  of  his 
interesting  thesis.  But,  in  dwelling  on 
its  idiosyncratic  quality,  which  is  of 
course  quite  independent  of  knowledge, 
he  certainly  inclines  to  divorce  the 
practice  of  poetry  from  the  knowledge 
with  which  if  it  is  important  it  is  in- 
fallibly associated.  He  says  archly: 
:'To  attribute  to  it  the  origin  of  great 
poetry,  is  paying  too  high  a  compli- 
ment even  to  so  valuable  a  thing  as 
ignorance"  —as  if  he  knew  anything 
about  ignorance !  But  he  adds  that 
"there  is  a  certain  antithesis  between 
poetry  and  knowledge"  and  that 
"poetry  exists  either  before  that  is 
acquired  or  after  it  is  surmounted." 
Naturally  he  can  demonstrate  what 
poetry  is  as  distinguished  from  prose, 
by  Whitman  as  well  as  by  Words- 
worth. And  thinking  thus  of  its  dis- 
tinctive character  rather  than  of  its 
142 


ART  AND   LETTERS 

comparative  rank,  ignoring  thus  one 
of  the  standards  which  measure  its 
value  —  since  it  would  be  idle  to  main- 
tain that  any  poetry  is  superior  to  any 
prose,  that  of  the  savage,  for  instance, 
to  the  prose  of  Burke  —  he  comes 
winningly,  but  not  quite  convincingly, 
to  suggest  to  all  of  us  who  wish  to 
enjoy  poetry  to  make  our  own.  "  Bet- 
ter even  than  understanding  poetry 
as  a  way  to  learn  the  enjoyment  of 
it,"  he  concludes  finely,  " —  and  that 
without  alienation  from  the  better 
poem  of  one's  own  existence  —  is  to 
create  it  for  one's  self."  Mr.  Eastman 
speaks,  as  the  French  say,  bien  a  son 
aise.  The  rest  of  us  may  justifiably 
feel  some  self-distrust,  and  continue 
to  get  our  enjoyment  out  of  the  born 
poets,  more  particularly  those  possessed 
of  knowledge  as  well  as  faculty.  Pos- 
sunt  quia  posse  videntur  implies  in  this 
case  too  hopeful  a  view.  But  there 


STANDARDS 

is  no  doubt  whatever  that  at  the 
present  time  enjoyment  of  poetry  is 
being  largely  extracted  from  its  pro- 
duction. And  so  far  as  value  is  con- 
cerned the  prodigious  production  of  it 
that  marks  our  epoch  must  be  ad- 
mitted to  contribute  far  less  to  the 
enjoyment  of  others  than  the  poetry 
which  preceded  it  and  which,  if  strictly 
professional,  was  far  more  intimately 
associated  with  that  general  knowledge 
now  so  generally  disesteemed.  General 
knowledge,  too,  quite  aside,  it  is  curi- 
ous to  note  how  much  more  lightly 
its  special  technic  is  taken  in  compari- 
son with  music,  for  example.  A  gen- 
eration ago  every  young  woman  played 
the  piano.  Now  she  realizes  the  vanity 
of  expecting  to  do  so  well.  A  genera- 
tion hence,  it  may  be,  she  will  be  con- 
vinced that  poetry  is  a  difficult  art 
also. 

Of  course,  as  I  began  by  saying,  the 
144 


ART  AND  LETTERS 

public  equally  with  the  artist  and  writer 
has  the  cause  of  art  and  letters  in  its 
keeping.  And  so  far  as  knowledge  is 
an  advantage  in  art  and  letters  it  is 
the  business  of  the  larger  public  - 
not  to  possess  it,  to  expect  which  would 
not  only  be  unreasonable  but  unneces- 
sary--but  to  respect  it,  as  it  is  the 
business  of  the  "remnant"  to  exact 
it.  To  advocate  any  peremptory  agen- 
cies to  this  end  would  be  as  illusory  as 
Mr.  Howells  shows  it  to  be  in  his  amus- 
ing story,  "The  Critical  Bookstore." 
The  philanthropist  who  sets  up  this 
establishment  to  combine  censorship 
with  commercialism  apparently  deals 
in  fiction  exclusively — where  certainly 
the  field  for  both  commerce  and  cen- 
sure is  so  vast  as  perhaps  to  justify 
a  monopoly  of  his  benevolent  efforts. 
His  experiment  proves  multifariously 
unsatisfactory,  and  experiencing  a  to- 
tal change  of  heart  he  shuts  up  his 


STANDARDS 

shop,  and  announces  his  conversion 
by  expressing  a  repugnance  to  artificial 
selection  which,  even  without  his  ex- 
perience, we  can  all  share.  But  he  ex- 
presses also  a  resignation  to  the  proc- 
esses and  results  of  natural  selection 
in  which  it  requires  a  very  considerable 
amount  of  optimism  to  participate. 
"What  is  all  the  worthy  family  of 
asses  to  do,"  he  exclaims,  "if  there  are 
no  thistles  to  feed  them?"  Is  the 
case  so  desperate  as  that  ?  Is,  in- 
deed, this  family  to  be  regarded  as  a 
constant  quantity  ?  Why,  at  any  rate, 
contribute  to  keep  it  so  by  pamper- 
ing it  with  its  favorite  food  ?  Why 
not,  in  a  word,  deplore  the  number  of 
asses  rather  than  the  failure  of  the 
thistle  crop  ?  It  is,  no  doubt,  less  a 
practical  than  a  sentimental  matter, 
but  the  more  the  cultivation  of  this- 
tles comes  to  be  looked  upon  with 
disfavor,  whatever  the  demand  for 
146 


ART  AND   LETTERS 

them,  the  more  the  taste  for  them  is 
likely  to  diminish  and  even  an  asinine 
demand  arise  for  different  provender. 
No  one  considers  morals  a  matter  to 
be  left  to  natural  selection.  Does  the 
intellect  need  less  help  ?  The  con- 
verted critical-bookstore  keeper  pro- 
ceeds to  state  his  view  of  the  Republic 
of  Letters  as  "  a  vast,  benevolent,  gen- 
erous democracy  where  every  one  may 
have  what  one  likes/'  and  his  concep- 
tion of  literature  as  "  the  whole  world, 
the  expression  of  the  gross,  the  fatu- 
ous, the  foolish,  as  well  as  the  expression 
and  the  pleasure  of  the  wise,  the  fine, 
and  the  elect."  But  it  is  notoriously 
difficult  to  keep  pace  with  the  zeal  of 
the  convert,  and  one  wonders  if  his 
ideal  in  this  case  is  not  fundamentally 
a  humane  rather  than  a  literary  one. 
How  better  express  the  distinction 
between  mere  printed  matter  and  liter- 
ature than  by  saying  the  latter  is  just 
H7 


STANDARDS 

this:  "the  expression  and  the  pleasure 
of  the  wise,  the  fine,  and  the  elect"  ? 
And  why  not  observe  the  distinction 
even  while  remembering  the  command- 
ing claims  of  human  happiness  ?  Per- 
haps after  all  some  other  way  may  be 
found  of  satisfying  these  claims  than 
by  adulterating  figs  with  thistles,  or 
by  encouraging  the  critical  inspector  to 
"pass"  thistles  as  figs,  especially  bear- 
ing in  mind  the  tendency  —  observed 
by  Renan  —  which  the  thistles  have 
to  get  the  upper  hand.  Perhaps  after 
all  figs  in  plenty  would  become  more 
popular  in  quarters  gradually  finding 
it  as  uncomfortable  to  be  viewed  de 
haut  en  has  by  the  gentle  heart  as  by 
the  arrogant  mind. 

At  all  events  it  is  to  have  in  mind 
some  other  cause  than  that  of  art  and 
letters,  to  conceive  of  these  as  an  abso- 
lutely unenclosed  domain  —  the  com- 
mon of  civilization,  so  to  say,  whose 
148 


ART  AND  LETTERS 

weedy  aspects  and  worn  places  and 
rubbish  heaps  are  as  legitimate  details 
as  its  cultivated  area.  Ought  not  ac- 
cess to  this  territory  to  be  made  more 
difficult,  as  difficult  as  possible  ?  At 
least  let  us  have  a  gate  —  the  strait, 
gate  whereby  he  who  has  some  kind  of 
credentials  may  enter  hi,  and  so  far  as 
possible  win  public  opinion  to  approve 
the  closing  up  of  those  other  ways  ac- 
cessible to  the  thief  and  the  robber. 
Quis  custodiet  ipsos  custodes  ?  Not  the 
authority  of  autocracy  certainly;  nor 
even  that  of  criticism  whose  function, 
as  I  said,  is  the  exposition  of  the  prin- 
ciples that  are  the  test  of  standards, 
so  much  as  the  standards  themselves 
which  arise  insensibly  in  the  mind  of 
the  cultivated  public  and  spread  in 
constantly  widening  circles.  Man- 
kind, once  more,  is  wiser  than  any 
man,  and  its  correlative  in  the  case 
of  arts  and  letters  is  the  public,  whose 
149 


STANDARDS 

co-operation  is  quite  as  important 
as  that  of  their  professional  represen- 
tatives. For  it  is  always  to  be  re- 
membered that  the  cause  of  letters, 
the  cause  of  art,  is  not  that  of  its 
practitioners  —  hardly  that  of  its  prac- 
tice —  but  of  its  constituting  stand- 
ards. Just  as  the  cause  of  mankind 
is  not  that  of  the  men  who  compose 
it,  which  it  is  the  weakness  of  purely 
material  philanthropy  to  forget.  The 
idea  is  not  a  vague  one.  And  since 
I  have  ventured  to  speak  of  routine 
France  as  more  sympathetic  than  de- 
vout, I  may  note  that,  so  far  from  be- 
ing vague,  it  is  an  idea  which  is  at  the 
present  time  being  illustrated  not  only 
splendidly,  supremely,  but  with  that 
precision  which  in  the  world  of  ideas 
is  a  French  characteristic.  We  have 
before  our  eyes  the  demonstration  of 
its  definiteness  by  an  entire  people 
animated  with  the  clear  consciousness 
150 


ART  AND   LETTERS 

that  what  counts  for  them,  in  this 
brief  interlude  of  time  between  two 
eternities,  is  not  the  comfort  or  even 
the  lives  of  any  or  all  Frenchmen, 
but  the  perpetual  renewal  of  the  con- 
secrated oil  that  feeds  the  torch  of 
France. 


UNIVERSITY  C"' 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


AUG  2      )61 

.       m-   '  :  * 

,c.~  0  LD 

DEC  11  1961 

•        4  MAB'63A£ 

APP  2  *-  1963 

3JUL'64HK 

REC'D  LD 

JULl  '64-lfl.AM 

AuTooisc.ocr23w  ' 

\-50m-12,  "60 
LslO)476B 


General  Library 
University  of  California 


GENERAL  LIBRARY  -  U.C.  BERKELEY 


BQD0313727 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


